Plural nouns like "sheep" are strange anomalies that might easily confuse a foreign student of our flexible and economical language, but odder by far are those collective, and again agricultural nouns, like a flock, a herd or a gaggle. I have a weakness for their peculiarities: a parliament of owls, for instance. Who has ever seen such a thing? Why bother to describe it? I love the delicacy of a charm of goldfinches; sociable and delightfully pretty birds, they really need a collective noun. Radio programmes have occasional phone-ins asking listeners to give a collective noun for a group of specific items, often of officials belonging to a department or calling; I would suggest a midden of DEFRA, a frown of carpark attendants. But there is a missing noun that I need for something I deal with every day, something that doesn't have an adequate, commonly understood collective: the computer.

Colleagues would probably tell me that computers should be collectively described as a bank or a network. I'm not convinced of this. A bank does have overtones of looking after something you'd rather you had control of such as money, or data, but computers seem to cost me money rather more often than the bank does. A network is something friendly to its component parts (think Old Boy Network) but despite (or because of) the frequent use I make of these machines and the almost addictive quality of email as a communication tool, I don't always find computers friendly. They are much better than they were originally of course; they no longer communicate through enigmatic remarks such as “Bad command or file name”, or “Abort, Retry, Fail?” Monochrome text-based screens have been replaced by millions of colours in highly pictorial Graphical User Interfaces. Even if the software- and web-designers are inclined to offer two interface screens where one will achieve the required result – here I'm thinking of DEFRA again – at least they are trying.

But there are times, like last week, when despite their efforts to be visually attractive I still think computers conspire to make my life difficult.

Computers are supposed to be logical and predictable. You put garbage in and get garbage out. Trouble is, you expect them to continue being logical. As long as they succeed in doing this they lull you into a false sense of security; you grow to rely on them. However, although ubiquitous computing is getting into the 'teens of years in age, computers and their associated hardware, like teenagers, are capable of confounding you by suddenly presenting behaviour you have never seen before. For me, it started with the monitor. This a flat 17” screen, version 2 of my Christmas present in 2004. The makers had replaced the original last November when it started flashing its display controls at me. I'm sure it was nothing personal, but like other flashers, it was not appreciated. The replacement, otherwise decently behaved, last week began to turn itself off while in use, and not respond when the On button was pressed. Punch any of the other controls however and it would come back without apology and go on, variably, for an hour, a day, or a minute before blanking out once more. I am now waiting for Neovo to come and replace the replacement.

I bought, sort of on a whim – maybe it was prescience – a nice Toshiba laptop. I made a Best Offer on eBay and got it for a little less than its mate made in a straight auction. So far, so good. The trouble is that the presence of a second computer in the house is bound to cause upsets. Not amongst the users but amongst the computers. I wasn't a bit surprised when, on being asked to accept a network card in order to connect with the laptop and a wireless access point, the big desktop machine spat the dummy. It refused to recognise its own main drive, or its second drive, and sat there flashing white text on a black screen that ordered me to back up my data and press F1 to continue. I pressed F1 and it restarted and said the same thing. I had backed up my data but it's on the second drive, which the computer refuses to look for. This is irritating.

Friendly Computer Doctor comes and attempts to make the disk repair itself, while we sit and yarn about mutual acquaintances and dodgy brands of hard drives (yes I can be a geek too). After an hour or more it hasn't repaired itself so the whole caboodle has to go and be disembowelled, the disk replaced, ghosted and returned. I insist it should all be tested only a little short of destruction before it comes back to me.

And we haven't got to the end of it. With the desktop machine AWOL, I have lost my broadband connection to the Internet. The Toshiba has a 56k modem, but it doesn't do broadband, instead offering a CAT 5 cable socket or a wireless card to connect to an external modem/router. Given this choice, I rather fancy being able to do email in the front room where the fire, telly and husband all look cosy in winter, so I go for the wireless option. Four days later I am not wireless but hairless from trying to persuade one bit of kit to talk to the other for longer than a handshake between Bush and Putin. I'm driven to ask for help from a work colleague, who observes that, “Cisco stuff does tend to be rather proprietary.” This is computer-speak for non standard and bloody awkward. We spend the afternoon inputting enigmatic numbers like 192.168.1.1. We choose security options. Settings that we think are saved mysteriously reset themselves while we are not looking. “Simple? – not.” An hour and a half later, on the kind of hunch that I only get when working with my Fell ponies, he asks the kit to communicate through Channel 1 instead of the recommended Channel 6 and we are up and running.

Bear in mind this has all happened in one week. I relayed this tale of woe to a friend with the frivolous comment that we must be on a ley line, and she said, “What you need is an exorcist!” Ah. A lightbulb moment.

So now I offer you a collective computing noun to replace the meek and inadequate word “network”. A curse of computers.