Chris ARNOT column; Computer age is moving too fast for comfort.

COMPUTER rage? Don't talk to me about computer rage. I'm suffering from it. Not as badly as some of those cited in the latest report by the research company Mori, I'll grant you. Not yet, anyway.

I haven't tried to karate chop my keyboard or head-butt the screen. But I do occasionally let out a bellow of frustration, loud enough to stop squirrels in their tracks and force nervous, migratory songbirds to take off again and head back to wherever they came from.

I blame Bill Gates, the owner of Microsoft and probably the richest man on earth. Unless you have his Windows software package, you can't send e-mail.

I was quite happy not having e-mail. Somehow, I've survived for half a century without it. But technology waits for no man. Mr Gates and his acolytes have persuaded us that unless you're "on-line," you're off limits.

A few years ago, I was still capable of boyish wonder. It struck me as nothing short of miraculous that I could plug a wire into the wall, press a few buttons and my words would disappear down a line and pop up on somebody else's screen in London. Since I went freelance in 1991, I've had no fewer than three computers. The first one broke down at regular intervals, chewing up my words and regurgitating them as incomprehensible gibberish. Only narrowly did it escape being hurled through The Shed window.

Its replacement was much more reliable. We could happily have grown old together, my last computer and I. It grieved me to have to say goodbye to it when it's still working perfectly well. But Mr Gates and his mates have put paid to our relationship. It happened like this . . .

The newspaper through which I earn much of my daily bread has had a new system installed. To "access" it, as they say in computerspeak, you have to be on-line. "The only other way you can get copy to us is by going back to the fax," I was told by a desk editor. He made it sound like pigeon post.

So I went out and blew nearly 500 quid on a new system of my own, complete with "Windows 98." At least, I told myself, I won't have to worry about the millennium bug. The prospect of waking up on January 1, 2000, to find that the computer has gone down is too depressing to contemplate. Which is a measure of how dependent we've become on these things.

They were supposed to be our servants, but sometimes I wonder if it's not the other way around.

The range of options offered by my new software is mind-blowing. When I press the wrong button or lean accidentally against my electronic mouse, I am plunged not so much into the wonderful world of Windows as a baffling hall of mirrors from which there is no easy escape.

No doubt I shall master it in time. Sending e-mails will become as easy as posting a letter.

But by then, I suspect, Mr Gates will have developed something even more fiendishly complicated and his latest invention will have become the mother of necessity.