There’s a reason that IT support engineers are not known as beacons of fashion – and it’s not because we don’t have our own innate sense of style.

No, it’s because, over the years, we’ve seen what happens when haute couture collides with haute technologie – and we’ve realised that something’s got to give.

Take a recent example. A client was having trouble because, every so often and without warning, her computer would just switch itself off. We tried everything: we connected remotely; we came out to her office to have a look at the machine.

But we just couldn’t see what was wrong. In the end, she decided that she could live with the situation and we reluctantly filed the problem under unsolved mysteries.

A little while later, we were in her offices again for another reason. We were crawling around on the floor tidying up cables when someone idly noticed that the client had a habit of swinging her leg under the table when she was concentrating.

He also noticed that she was wearing a particularly stylish pair of shoes.

And the pointiest point at the end of her shoe was swinging dangerously close to the “off” button on her computer tower.

Just as our engineer was slowly putting two and two together, her shoe hit the button and the computer turned off.

So, the mystery was solved. She had not realised what she was doing because the “off” button on her tower was so sensitive, and because the shoes were very pointy. All we had to do was reposition her computer tower and the problem never happened again. But that’s why we at Firstline stick to trainers.