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There is a particular kind of district meeting at which I have spent enough hours by now to know the rhythm. Files move; schemes are reviewed; someone produces a number that requires explanation; someone else explains it. Mid-meeting last week, an email arrived on my phone. The screen reader, doing its job, read it aloud. A senior colleague I work closely with – a decent man, the kind one would not call unkind – turned and asked what that was. I told him. It was, I should add, the fifth time I was telling him.

We were not in unfamiliar territory. He has watched me work with Claude and ChatGPT. He knows I write code. He knows I am, by the modest standard of officers in our service, decently active on social media. None of this had landed. So he asked, for the fifth time, whether a screen reader could read emails. I said yes. He asked me to show him. I showed him. And then he said, very good that you can use all this, but make sure you don’t send accidental messages.

I have learned to receive such sentences without much weather. Condescension, in my experience, comes more often dressed in solicitude than in malice; eventually, one learns to take the parcel without opening it. The officer is not, by any reasonable measure, the problem. He is curious, willing to ask, willing to be shown, willing to be shown again. That is more than most. What stayed with me afterwards was not the sentence itself but the question it raised, which I have been turning over since.

The next morning I tried to log in to a government portal for employees, a portal through which we are supposed to keep track of various schemes  and programmes of our employer. The portal asked me to clear a CAPTCHA. The CAPTCHA refused to read. After a few minutes of attempted navigation that produced nothing useful, I called a volunteer on Be My Eyes – an application that connects blind users to sighted volunteers willing to describe what is on the screen. The volunteer, on the other end of a video call, told me that the CAPTCHA was sitting behind a McAfee popup announcing the expiration of an antivirus subscription. I had stopped using the antivirus a long while ago. The popup, evidently, had not found it convenient to leave me alone.

I thanked the volunteer, ended the call and tried to uninstall McAfee. The uninstaller, I discovered with........

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