“Mandy’s tally clocked in at 87,086 FreeCell games, demonstrating Roy Castle level sof dedication”

During lockdown, I rummaged through various boxes and cupboards looking for items that have been gathering dust for too long. I’ve done the same with my hard drive, so this month’s column is a selection of tales that never made it into the magazine. Think of it as an unreleased Monty Python script with none of the funny bits and absolutely no cultural significance.

Let’s start with Tesla. Mr H owns several Teslas, but the one he’d selected to drive to our shop was a Model X P100D, which has a forecourt price of around £85,000. Mr H pushed two USB sticks towards me and asked me to “fix his Tesla”.

Teslas have a feature called Sentry Mode, which uses the external cameras on the car to detect potential threats. The footage writes to a USB stick and the one supplied by Mr H’s dealer had met an unfortunate end inside a washing machine. Mr H had sourced a replacement, which his fleet of Teslas refused to utilise.

One USB) to compare and saw straight away that the dealer stick had FAT32 formatting but the new stick was NTFS. Two mouse clicks later I stepped into the Tesla, which refused the reformatted stick.