Things my girlfriend and I have argued about (online version)

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Because of my selfless desire to further the vocabulary of medical science, it would delight me to the toes if everyone could adopt the use of the phrase 'Margret's Syndrome'. This affliction being used to signify a condition characterised by a profound and chronic 'point blindness'. Allow me to give you a case study for diagnostic purposes:

I bought a mobile phone the other day. Yes, I'm aware that this revokes my human rights and I won't disgust you further by attempting any kind of wheedling justification. We all become what we hate (raising the disturbing possibility that one morning I'll awake to discover I'm Andie MacDowell, but let's avoid looking there) and so I've naturally mutated in that direction. Anyway, I spent the best part of an afternoon entering the names and numbers of people I know into the internal address book via the phone's keypad — an activity that's roughly as much fun as performing emergency dental surgery on yourself. The picosecond I'd finished, Margret walked into the room and said, 'Let's have a look at your phone.'

'Don't touch anything,' I replied with sombre gravity.

About two minutes later, when I returned from the kitchen with a cup of tea, Margret glanced up at me and chattily asked, 'Can you get back things that you've deleted?'

My lips became the thinnest of lines.

Margret doesn't know what she's deleted, but does offer the solution, 'Tsk — you'll find out eventually if it's important.' I have to admit that this phrase would be rather good to recite repeatedly, singsong fashion, as I danced around a swirling bonfire in the centre of which Margret was staked. Now, had we handed out a simple questionnaire to the population of the Earth, almost everyone would have replied that the point — the point — of the argument that was now racing through volume levels was that Margret had deleted something, without even knowing what it was, after I'd spent hours setting up the phone and had specifically said not to touch anything. Margret's assessment, however, was this:

'You know what the trouble is? You're a gadget freak.'