On Monday tech gremlins started chewing on random things in our house.

First up: voicemail. The gremlin ate our message and started answering our phone in its weird machine voice. Easy enough to fix.

Yesterday, the gremlin ate TiVo: just munched its way through all our settings and saved video. Fortunately, we’re all backed up in the cloud, so we got it all back. But for ten minutes it was heart-stoppingly horrible.

Then this morning, it somehow got into Photoshop. It took me a while to notice. When I was trying to change my Twitter icon (which I’ve been fooling about with on and off ever since the Anglo-Saxon episode). Twitter kept rejecting my photo, saying I hadn’t chosen a file. I had chosen a fucking file. Over and over. Twitter ignored me. I went off to make a cup of tea (better than counting to ten) and realized, Huh, it’s a file size issue. And, sure enough, it turns out the gremlin had got into Photoshop, too, and resized an ordinary snapshot to 120 MB.

The photos the gremlin futzed with are these, taken last year:



So, tech gremlin, be advised: I am armed. Don’t fuck with me anymore. But if you’re just attention-seeking because you’re lonely, fear not: I’ll introduce you to Clementine.