It vexes me.

A strange little red blobby thing has recently appeared on my RSS feeds. It marks a couple of folders which are, as far as I can tell, in no way different to any of my other folders. It vexes me. It does not appear in any way whatsoever to affect the functionality of the feeds or, indeed, to do anything at all, nonetheless it vexes me because, in my perhaps naive way, I believe it must be there for a reason. The people who wrote the feed aggregator surely haven't just decided to add a random little red blobby thing simply to vex me and therefore it does vex me.

This kind of thing happens to me rather a lot.

Web sites that I visit regularly will suddenly have a new look, or a new feature, or a flashing icon, or an indecipherable message or a little red blobby thing and, whatever it is, it will have appeared without warning and without explanation (that I have seen anyway).

I will puzzle over it for a while, perhaps try to find out from the help screens what it is, and almost inevitably be unable to work it out.

And then, just as inevitably it goes away.

And that vexes me too.

I lead a very vexing existence.

How is that even possible?

I've been having problems with my computer recently. Basically certain websites have, when I connect to them, been behaving rather oddly. Not logging me in properly, not letting me have access to certain sections of them. Giving me access to a different random selection of pages each time I log in. Plain weird.

I tried connecting on different computers with different operating systems and using different firewalls. No joy.
I contacted the sites to find out if I was alone in this. I was.
I contacted my ISP and spent a lot of time on the phone without success.
I took my laptop and modem to a shop and we tried an apparently identical modem with my laptop and my modem with an apparently identical laptop. The problem suddenly semed to be with my modem.
I spent more time on the support line and we agreed to replace both the modem and the sim card, though neither of us could see how either of those things could produce such strange symptoms.

They said they would send a new sim and a secure envelope to return the modem. The sim came this morning and I popped it into my old modem and lo and behold, the problem has gone away.

My question is this. How in the hell is it even possible for a sim card to have a fault that specifically produces that kind of error on certain sites and no errors at all on any other sites?

I don't get it.