Not the Government, clearly.

This latest fiasco - two discs containing personal records (including bank details) of 25 million people got lost in the post - is almost too mind-boggling to contemplate. Not least because all the sources seem to say different things: I read an article this morning claiming the discs were password protected but the data wasn’t encrypted, and then another saying the data was encrypted but not password protected. Whichever it is, it doesn’t sound terribly secure, does it?

And yet there are protocols in place to stop this from happening, and it was apparently just an innocent mistake by a junior member of staff. There’s no evidence to suggest that anyone with malicious intent has actually got hold of the discs - they might just have got lost in transit somewhere along the line, and they’ll turn up eventually unharmed.

Or, they might not.

I really don’t know what to say, or think, about all this. I’ll be keeping an eye on the news as the story unfolds, though, that’s for sure.

A friend recently decreed that it’s only winter once you’ve heard Do They Know It’s Christmas being played somewhere. Helpfully, he also supplied a YouTube video featuring that very song, so I can safely say that, at least for me, it’s now officially winter, and also officially time to start worrying about Christmas.

And I’m won’t be the only one fretting about what to buy, and where to get it from. The BBC is currently reporting that there will be a shortage of Nintendo Wii consoles this Christmas. So if you, or your kids, have got one of those on the list, you might be out of luck - or, at least, paying over the odds to guarantee getting hold of one.

Another supposedly hot Christmas favourite, the Pleo robot dinosaur (very cute!) seems to have been withdrawn from the websites of most of the stores that were going to be stocking it, and it’s only just gone into production. It’ll be like the Furby all over again, except Pleo costs £250.

Not looking good for tech toys, then, is it?

If you’re really struggling for ideas, I’ve got one suggestion: the TARDIS USB hub. Under £15, it’s brought hours of joy to an unnamed colleague, who has to hide it under his desk every time he wants to plug something into it because it makes really, really loud TARDIS noises when it detects a new device.

Hours of fun!

According to a survey, 90% of people who shop online have had a bad experience somewhere along the way - either because goods weren’t as described, or because they never showed up, or because their credit card number got ripped off along the way. Nine out of every ten people who shop online.

That seems like a lot. And if, as the survey suggests, 40% of people who have a bad experience with a particular retailer online stop buying from that retailer, it seems like an awful lot of businesses should be folding pretty soon. (It’s possible that people say they’re going to boycott a company when asked, and mean it, too… until they need to buy something and that retailer is the only, or even just the cheapest, place to buy it from.) That sounds like a pretty serious problem to me.

Thinking about it, I’m trying to figure out when/if I’ve ever had a bad experience shopping online. Touch wood, I’ve been okay so far. I bought something from an eBay merchant once that took weeks and weeks to show up, but eventually did turn up; I’ve had items lost or stolen in transit, but the etailer readily replaced them. Nothing has happened that would make me actively boycott a company. (Besides maybe Royal Mail.)

So, in a move that reeks of desperately fishing for comments, has anyone reading this had a particularly bad experience with online shopping? What happened? Did it get resolved? And if not, are you still boycotting the company in question? Enquiring minds want to know.