Dear Lord Sugar, it’s been a sad week.
A kind of bereavement, really.
Today, a council employee in a yellow jacket
climbed down from his municipal truck
and flung into it my old friend
of — what? — twenty years?

We never needed passwords between us.
It never told me bad news about my server
or jumped off the edge of the screen
or tried to sell me corduroy trousers
or ham or celebrity gossip.
It was like a butler: discreet, self-effacing.

But at last it began to suffer
touches of dementia. Sometimes,
I told the council man, things have to die quietly
and be eviscerated for the common good.
He nodded deferentially, but raced off
in an eye-watering flourish of exhaust.