I’m not a neo-Luddite or a technophobe in anyway you understand, I used to earn a living being a professional nosy parker on behalf of the government looking into confidential computer files that others would rather the government didn’t know the contents of. Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you which government, but I was very good at my job. I just like my privacy, so when I go out I want to be beyond reach and I don’t want to be contactable.

So when the mobile phone went off in the glove box of the car I was driving, which I had obtained from the car pool, I was more than a bit irritated. Like all mobiles it was a satellite trackable object, and since I didn’t want anyone to know where I was going something had to be done. I picked it up, disabled it and looked hard at the nearly full slurry tank as a wicked idea and smile came over me. When I returned the car to the pool the following morning, I was informed by the mechanic in the car pool that my section head wanted a word.

As I entered her office I was greeted with, “Where is the mobile phone that was in the car? It had important data on it.”

“More bloody fool whoever planted it on me. I’ll be back in a minute.” I went to the lab and obtained a pair of rubber gloves from the box. When I got back I gave them to her and said, “You could try looking for it in a twelve foot deep slurry tank on a farm at this grid reference. That’s where I was just before I disabled it as your data will shew. You’ll maybe find the gloves useful or may be diving equipment, but I don’t know if a phone will survived lying at the bottom of twelve feed of liquid cow manure for twenty-four hours.

“Now if you don’t mind I only came in to return the car. This is my day off, and out there I have appointments with my hairdresser, my manicurist and a rather ravishing young man who is taking me to lunch and has promised to shew me his etchings this afternoon. Bye.” I would be making sure I was not tracked, bugged or in any other way under surveillance for my date because Antoine worked for the opposition and would be delivering a job offer as well as a rather more personal one. I just love the business I’m in. You meet such personable young men. At twenty-eight next year I'm seriously looking for a permenant one, but he has to be in my line of work and working for the same side. Antoine would be perfect, once I change sides that is.

I love to flounce. It’s not often I get the opportunity to have a really good flounce that makes my hair flick, my bosom bounce and my frock swish, but as flounces go that was a first class one that took me out of Silvia’s office. It was almost as much fun as dropping that mobile phone in the steelworks ore cart before it went up to tip its load into the furnace had been. I’m afraid if that data was valuable as opposed to Silvia deliberately lying to me, as she does regularly, it is well and truly irrecoverable, but the firm doesn’t need to know that. They’ll be too busy for a while checking out those slurry tanks. There were four of them and you’ll notice if you look back over my conversation with Silvia not only didn’t I say I had dropped it in a slurry tank, I didn’t say which one of the four I didn’t drop it in. After all, a girl has to have some secrets.