While some people will have received chocolate rabbits and chickens as well as eggs at Easter, I was sent a worm - and it certainly wasn't edible.

It arrived, uninvited and unwanted, while I was working on my computer.

A message told me You Got Mail and when I scanned my emails something new was sitting unopened in my inbox.

I didn't recognise the sender and normally I simply delete any unsolicited bumph.

In recent weeks I've been inundated with invitations to download pornographic images, improve my finances by investing in obscure savings schemes (scams more like), and enlarge various portions of my anatomy, including some which, being female, I don't possess.

Unfortunately, my mind was on other matters (chocolate eggs perhaps?) when this latest piece of twaddle arrived.

Before I could utter 'Oh, no!' I'd opened it and unfortunately, unlike snail mail, you can't re-seal an email, mark it Opened in Error and Return to Sender. You're lumbered.

If you're lucky, an unsolicited email will prove to be just like any other form of junk mail, annoying but relatively harmless.

If you're unlucky you'll not only have mail, you'll have trouble, possibly Big Trouble. And last week it was my turn for the Big T.

After I'd opened the email my computer became deranged, only mildly so but enough to prove disconcerting.

It refused to obey instructions and finally had to be unceremoniously removed from active service by being unplugged.

"Boot it up again and see what happens," said a friend I rang for advice.

Being someone who is not only computer illiterate but basically an out-and-out technophobe, all I wanted to do was boot the offending piece of equipment through the window.

When booting up didn't work, it was time to call in the experts.

"Looks like you've got a virus," they said.

"A virus? OhmiGod! You mean virus as in SARS? But how? Why? When?"

Probably came in with yesterday's emails, one in particular," I was told. I knew, without asking, which one in particular.

I also knew without asking that I should have taken the advice I was given a couple of years ago and bought some antivirus software for my computer. But I hadn't.

Now my computer was contaminated and capable of contaminating any other unprotected computers if I tried to send an email. I was an online outcast.

I wanted to bleat: "Please, please make my poor computer better."

I didn't need to beg. The experts read my mind. "Don't worry, we'll locate the virus and get rid of it," they said.

And they did, as well as giving it a name. It was a worm, a naith (or perhaps it was a neath) worm that originated in Kazakhstan (or perhaps it was Kurdistan or possibly Kalamazoo).

Feeling a bit of a worm myself, I finally took my cleansed and now protected computer home, fit and well and ready for action. I'd like to end there, on an "and they all lived happily ever after" note, but it wasn't to be.

Carrying the computer into my house I tripped over a dangling wire (yes, I know it shouldn't have dangled) and there was a Crash! ... and then I cried.

If I ever discover the identity of the */!**!! who sent me that wretched virus they'll discover this particular worm has turned.