Walking round the shopping arcades of Britain – as I seem to have spent far too long doing over the past few days – I’ve been curious to see how retailers have dealt with Sony’s announcement of a cheaper version of the Playstation 3. Predictably, they’ve embraced it with open arms, to the point where Sony now boasts of a 178% increase in PS3 sales over the past weekend (although as someone wise probably said, 178% of little is still not very much).

But I can’t help feeling uncomfortable at a deception taking place here. Because the new £299 Playstation 3 price point has come at a cost to the consumer, of which many I’d argue know little about. For this isn’t the same machine that’s previously been sold for £425 that’s being discounted (and that’s why retailers are being very careful with their terminology). Instead, it’s a unit that’s got a 40GB hard drive instead of 60GB, has had all backwards compatibility with PS2 games taken away, has lost a memory slot and USB ports, and generally is a lower spec’d machine.

Joe Public, judging by the scenes I saw over the weekend, doesn’t seem to have realised this, nor is there a queue of shop assistants looking to put them right. They’re just glad to be shifting PS3s again in a quantity previously only seen in the first two weeks after launch.

It’s an uncomfortable sleight of hand that Sony has pulled here, even before you consider how it flies in the face of its previous statements one or two of its represenatives have made. And while it’ll likely give the Playstation 3 a better Christmas than it was previously facing, it’s a pity that the consumer is having to bear a bit of the brunt for such a mess being made of the PS3 project in the first place.

Most weeks, I end up staying in a London hotel. And most weeks, given that this is a fairly new, if suitably economical, residence, I have a problem with the electronic door key system. There’s nothing more heartwarming after a long day working to crash back at a hotel, only to come back down eleven floors to tell someone on receptionist that the door card isn’t working. If I’m lucky, sometimes I can detect a roll of the eyes, but most weeks I get away scott free.

Then the usual always happens when you ask for help with a piece of technology: along comes someone and fixes it within a second without explaining what they did. When I ask, I get told that you “insert the card like this”, which matches the exact same method that I’d used 20 or 30 times before going and asking for help in the first place.

And so, week in week out, the majority of times I would be stumped by this problem, and around one in every three weeks everything would work okay. Yet the rest of the time it didn’t. And every time it broke, someone would come and get it working straight away with the exact same explanation.

Now I have many faults, but I don’t think being permanently dim week after week is one of them. I at least like to implement my many low intelligence moments in shifts. It did all get me thinking about a small business who I provided technical support to for a couple of years in my younger days, where the frequent criticism I received was that I’d go in, fix something and not tell anyone what I’d done, meaning the same call would inevitably come up the following week. Maybe this is some form of belated comeback for that?

But even in technical support, I worked out soon enough that arming the end user with the necessary information more often went right than it went wrong (although, naturally, sometimes if went very, very wrong). And so I did start taking time to explain what had had happened, and how to fix things. End result? The number of calls went down, the computers were working that bit longer, and everyone was (seemingly) happy.

I bring this up because last night, someone at the hotel bothered to explain what was, in the end, a stupidly logical answer to my weekly adventure. Simply: there’s quite a long time delay between the computer writing a door card and the door itself being able to accept it. The weeks when my key had worked perfectly were those when the room had been in a more remote part of the hotel, and had thus taken me longer to get to. In short: all I had to do was wait about another minute.

It’s taken the hotel a good few months to relate this to me (and, in truth, I feel stupid for not working it out myself – I blame fatigue), and now, as a result, the days of eyeball rolling may well be over.

Ironically, it was the new and enthusiastic member of staff who told me this. The old hands, the ones most fed up with taking the trip up and down the stairs to fix the ‘broken’ key cards, had never even hinted this was the cause, only once revealing that “lots of guests have the same problem”.

At the very least, it made me feel a little less stupid. Just for a minute.