Crystal therapy, magnet therapy, reflexology, reiki ... there's no shortage of nonsense floating around on the web to waste money on. Ordinarily, they're there to be filed in the bunkum bucket, alongside dowsing rods, psychic predictions and those 'pills' I seem to get adverts for in every other piece of spam. However, this month, I've been having the most amazing trouble with my Pc. Most of the time, it won't switch on. All the traditional medicines have failed miserably: hitting it, hitting it harder, hitting it with a hammer and reinstalling Windows. Clearly, the only alternatives were attempting to harness the dark, mysterious, nonsensical arts that jangle against every fiber of my sceptical, cynical self or calling tech support.

It's time for New Age cobblers then. The thing is that what patently doesn't affect a person, like magnet therapy (the bizarre belief that sticking a big block of metal against your head can cure anything from headaches to scrofula) suddenly become relevant when applied to a computer. Put a magnet up against your head and you'll only feel a fool, as opposed to putting it on your hard drive and magically feeling that you should have backed it up.

Likewise, never mind talk of energy flowing through the body, simply lay hands on your wounded equipment, and you'll really get in touch with power beyond your control. True, it's the National Grid - but let's not quibble.

Come to think of it, computers are the one item that you can see bending all the unarguable rules of the universe around their thumb. Never mind some cold­ reading con-artist claiming to know your innermost secrets about five seconds after having to ask your name - it's nothing compared to that mysterious big box's ability to crash precisely at the point you think "I really should save this about now." And mysterious creatures you cannot see and hear? Forget ghosts. Forget fairies.

We have electronic gremlins, and we can prove their existence whenever we like. Simply move a broken PC into the vicinity of an engineer and watch it spring back to life as if nothing was ever wrong. And add another supernatural offering into the mix - breathing life into the quite evidently dead.

There's got to be a service offering in that at least. Have an engineer watching over your shoulder whenever you switch on a machine, and it will never break. Let the balloon go up and the bombs fall, mark my words; as long as there's an engineer on standby in a well-sealed radiation suit, there'll be more than a few cockroaches around setting up web pages and playing Duke Nukem Forever long after humanity breathes its last.

And don't forget divination. That's the flip-side of the coin, when the engineer's natural connection to
the dark arts fails, as seen through hours of staring fixedly at Control Panel, hovering the mouse over screen after screen of garbage in the hope of plunging in and extracting a raw nugget of shining gold inspiration. It's one of those great mysteries of computing life, like the way that swearing provides improved operation, or how overclockers can spot the extra demi-Hertz in a system that's already powerful enough to hunt for alien life as a screensaver. And there's homeopathic cures too, in the form of software like registry cleaners and cookie cleaners that dilute potentially effective components into a placebo effect.

I suppose that we already have our own version of reflexology, thanks to beating the heck out of systems that refuse to work properly - and it works too, despite no real evidence of how it does
- along with prodding sharp objects into any available hole in the hope of finding some secret reset button that only acupuncture makes available. Wonder if it would be as popular in the real world if its practitioners used unbent paperclips and drawing pins. . .

Hmm. Really, all these people looking for some mystical Age of Enlightenment should just buy themselves a Pc. Sadly, despite all this massed spiritual cobblers, mine's still broken. Still, no matter. The hideous old thing's fully insured and there's a big window just on my left. Looks like some lucky passer by is in for their very own UFO encounter. On second thought, better wait for a traffic warden.