Ian Wood: Broken laptop takes me back to distant days on Apache ground

There's rarely a situation so bad that there won't be something worse lurking in the wings. I went through a depressing spell when they took away my typewriter and gave me a laptop which required me to click on the word "start" in order to close the thing down.

When I was first informed that this was the case, my first instinct was to run away and hide, but it didn't take long for me to realise that this wouldn't serve any good purpose and, anyway, the hard fact was that I could no longer run. Accordingly, I forged on and, in the fullness of time, came to terms with the machine to the extent that I could approach it without the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

Now, years after that dramatic introduction to the new technology, something else has happened. The powers that be have decided that things have been going along too smoothly for this particular relic and have done something about it. I don't know exactly what they've done, but then I've never known exactly what they've been up to. Suffice to say, they might just have gone a trick too far for this particular old dog. Some subtle adjustment has been made to the innards of the apparatus which has, for the time being at any rate, rendered it pretty well useless as far as my needs are concerned.

The transition was made last week with the result that after I'd completed the column, I found myself unable to send it. Try as I might, the item over which I'd sweated so diligently declined to be sent anywhere. Indeed, it insisted on hanging around with a determination which might have been touching if it hadn't been so irritating. It was like trying to discard an unwanted boomerang. The only reactions from the machine were occasional terse and negative messages advising me to try again, which was pretty cool when everybody, apart from me, knew there wasn't any point.

Eventually, after some desperate exchanges with a sympathetic Sports Desk, which seemed to be almost as bemused by the turns of events as I was, a solution was found. It was a temporary one, but effective nevertheless and it was a very old one. In fact, it was one I'd been more or less reared on since joining the ranks of sports writers. I dictated the copy by telephone. It was a bit like running outside and hailing a hansom cab.

One of the most positive aspects of working with a laptop is the ability to dispense with dictating copy once it has been written.

Since I struggled to cope with all the clicking and quirkiness of the machine in the early days, I've remained deeply grateful for the luxury of being able to get copy away speedily and without delay, dispensing with the need to toil for another half hour in a stifling press centre struggling to make clear what I was talking about to someone who'd never heard of the sport on which I was reporting.

A distinguished victim of the dictation system, which was the only one available in the pre-laptop era, was Frank Moran of The Scotsman, in his day the doyen of golf writers. Once, when telephoning the office with his copy from St Andrews - and there was lots of it - he found himself at the mercy of one of the team of phone boys and girls, of which I was a member at the time. Golf was not the forte of the lad who took the call and, as a result, when Frank dictated a phrase about some golfer or other "lobbing a sand-wedge onto the green," the word "sand-wedge" was recorded as "sandwich" which gave the phrase a whole new meaning, conjuring up a charming image of impromptu picnics on the Tom Morris green.

That wasn't the only misfortune suffered by Mr Moran during that call. In the course of describing another passage of play, he referred to a golfer's ball finishing up on a patch of ground behind a green. The copytaker again misheard, went with the phonetics and typed "Apache ground," which, while mangling the original copy, certainly lent it a thrilling edge not often found in your average golf report. I don't know what happened to that copytaker, though I suspect he might have emigrated.

I had a melting moment in Bulgaria once, when covering an Aberdeen European tie against a club called Marek Dimitrov. From a press point of view, it had been a difficult trip and things weren't helped by the fact that Locomotiv Sofia were also in action that day and outgoing calls were being badly delayed.

As a result, I had filleted my copy to the bare bones so that should I ever get through to the office, the transmission wouldn't take long. When I eventually got through, I told the copytaker just to crack on and not be put off by any names she didn't catch (Bulgarian names can go on a bit) and let the Desk take care of things.

We were off. "Aberdeen," I began, and was promptly interrupted. "Who?" she asked. I knew then that this wasn't going to be easy.