I've just been in town trying to buy a data cable for my phone. I couldn't be arsed to go into Darlington, so I went to the local phone shop in Richmond instead. This is one of those places that belongs to a small chain (I can't quite remember the name - something like "Tat 4 U" or "We Are Shit", I think) that's signed up as a reseller for the major service providers, and, consequently, will go swiftly and messily bust the moment Vodafone and Orange change their pricing structures.

However all I wanted was a cable so I decided to give them a try - and, immediately, entered into one of the defining cultural experiences of our times. For those who were young in the first half of the twentieth century the defining experience was war: comradeship, cruelty, shortages and in many cases the daily expectation of death or crippling injury. If your time was the sixties, you will remember some sort of sexual and cultural revolution. The seventies, depression. The eighties, monetarism. The nineties, materialism.

But my peers and I will look back on the defining experience of the richest portion of our lives as standing around in phone shops thinking 'when the fuck are these people going to be finished?'

All that is by the by. The real purpose of this post is to explain my new Theory of Inverse Capability, which, let me tell you, I had plenty of time to formulate while the single shop assistant was explaining to the customer in front of me that no, she didn't actually have to trail a very long wire after her wherever she went in order to use her new handset. The Theory is basically this: the more technologically advanced a product, the less intelligent the people employed to sell it.

If you walk into a small, independent furniture store hoping to buy a table, you will probably be guided in your purchase by someone who really knows what s/he's talking about - if not the craftsman himself, then a shop assistant who is finely attuned to the idea of what a table is for, how different tables might suit the decor of your home, and, in general, is au fait with the basic Platonic idea of 'tableness'. At least that's my experience.

But say you want to buy a computer? You find yourself in PC World discussing the very cutting edge of home computing technology with an individual who apparently doesn't have the inner resources to fight a sustained battle against BO, let alone grasp the finer relative complexities of different platforms and operating systems. If you insist on the very finest technology available the chances are that your purple, gnome-like interlocutor will shut down completely, his brain unable to deal with new concepts at the same time as operating an advanced cardio-vascular system.

Mobile phones aren't on quite the same technological level as computers, and so, true to the Theory, the shop assistant was a little brighter than the average PCW goblin. Needless to say, she was still utterly unable to help me.

You can probably tell from the length of this post that I've got shitloads of work to do. There's another Inverse situation to consider: however Inverse Procrastination is not a theory at all - it has all the weight of Law.