What do you MEAN, 'Click on the thing which looks like a Mondrian?'

Something for the Weekend, Sir? A minicab driver is cross with me. As we swing around the tidy little streets of 60s-built suburbia, none of which look familiar, he fixes me in his rear-view mirror and snarls: “Don’t you know where you live?”

Yes I do, I reply in calming tones, adding – less helpfully – it’s you who doesn’t know where I live. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s simply of not knowing how to get there, and I was rather hoping that would be your job. That’s why I took a taxi home rather than hire a self-drive, take a bus, use my Star Trek transporter, smuggle myself on board a lorry at Calais, commandeer a passing motorbike at gunpoint or hijack a 747 to get there.

This was in the mid-1990s. Back then, as now, the only kind of cab that could take you anywhere reliably within a city centre was a licensed taxi – the ubiquitous "black cab" – whose driver has a photographic memory of all the streets: what is generally called "The Knowledge".

In the suburbs, you make do with minicabs. Minicab drivers have "The Ignorance". These days, they are able to support their specialist lack of direction and spatial awareness with the help of a GPS. But they didn’t in the mid-1990s.

My driver seemed friendly enough when I got in. Take me to 10 Acacia Park Drive, my good man, I said. No problem, he said, casually asking whether it was part of the new Acacia Park housing development. Yes I suppose it must be, I replied, but confessed I had only just moved into the flat that week and was unfamiliar with the area. That was why I had phoned for a minicab.

Ten minutes later, we were in Acacia Park.

Ten minutes after that, we were still driving around Acacia Park, slowing down to read every street sign. The driver had begun harrumphing.

I do hate it when minicab drivers harrumph. It augments the odour of stale sick coming off the seats with increasing levels of the acrid burning rubber stench of the driver’s rancid breath. I gently suggest he stop the car for a moment and consult a street map while I struggle with a broken handle to lower the passenger window.

As soon as I spot my flat in the hazy distance, he lurches to an emergency halt and insists he has taken me home. I do not argue since the combination of his breath and the ambient stink of the vehicle’s interior furnishing is causing my eyes to water and my stomach to heave. Paying up and getting out of the car is a blessing, even if I have to walk the remaining quarter of a mile to my front door.

The lesson I learnt that day was that I should take pains to be precise in the way I express unfamiliar concepts. My mistake was to agree with paintstripper-breath that I lived in a generic area called Acacia Park. My flat was on its outskirts but, not unreasonably, the driver took me directly to the centre and promptly got us both lost.

The experience turned me into a difficult customer. When asking for something in a shop, I repeat it three times, just in case. When conversing with till assistants, I use monosyllabic words pronounced slowly in a near-shout and I gesticulate, charades-style, for emphasis. All that’s missing from my performance is a thin moustache and a pith helmet.

Ordering a pizza can take a very long time because I know that unless I ask the person at the other end of the phone to spell my address back to me, letter by letter, my pizza will grow cold in the hands of a dopey moped rider arguing with a householder outside the front door of 10 Cicada Park Road on the other side of town.

During software training, I am armed with a quiver of interface jargon arrows that I fire off accurately and precisely, hitting the red bull every time. For me, “buttons” and “icons” are not the same thing, oh no no, young Bucky, not the same thing at all. Neither are “tabs” and “titles”, “panels” and “panes” or “pop-ups” and “drop-downs”. For heaven’s sake, “pop-ups” go up and “drop-downs” go down: how can they possibly be the same? If I can’t even describe what they are, how can I expect my trainees to know what to click on?

Yes, I am boring and sad and annoying but I am clear.

The last time I relaxed my attitude during a training course, it took only a few minutes before things fell apart. As is quite common, one trainee in the class was struggling with having to cope with learning new software while a boring, sad and annoying pedantic bastard was constantly droning away and telling her what to do.

Thinking it would be helpful for her, I stopped using the proper names for the various tools and buttons scattered around the interface and, instead, resorted to referring to them by patronisingly cute nicknames such as “the arrow tool”, “the icon that looks a bit like a balloon” and “the burger button”.

By the way, the burger button is the one for calling up additional menus but reminds me of a thick sandwich. Scaled up, it looks like this:

Just be grateful I didn’t call it a “cake slice” or a “Scooby Snack”.