Eric Schmidt goofed.

It wasn’t a massive, loud goof. It’s not as if he dropped custard into the cleavage of the wife of the Russian Prime Minister or sat on a Saudi Prince’s priceless and beloved cat. But he goofed, all the same, in a very significant way.

He said it was Google’s policy “to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it”.

A lot of people have talked about this, and mostly their worries centre on where the Creepy Line is and whether Google has crossed it. Since Mr Schmidt routinely says things like “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”, which is creepy as hell as far as I’m concerned, that debate is pretty much uninteresting to me. Plus also, while I love Google for some of the things they’ve done, I don’t much fancy the ASA/Google Book Settlement. In fact, I think it’s a nightmare of compulsory licensing and private lawmaking. I think their attitude to (other people’s) IP and their attitude to privacy are of a piece, a kind of wonky, unexamined Ultra-Free Market Collectivism.

All that aside, what I find revealing about Mr Schmidt’s comment is this: it’s the perfect statement of conventional corporate culture. It’s not “Don’t Be Evil” at all. It’s “Get absolutely as close to Evil as you can without having to acknowledge that you’re evil.” And here’s the thing about Evil: it is diffuse. It is nebulous. The trick with avoiding Evil is that you don’t want to be near it, because it will slosh over the side of the Evil Bathtub and get Evil Foamy Suds on your shoes. If you want not to be Evil – as you can see pretty clearly if you read the coverage of the Iraq War Logs released recently by Wikileaks – you have to create a buffer zone between you and anything which even looks as if it could possibly be Evil. You have to say: “okay, that, over there, that is Evil, and we are going to avoid it! We will allow nothing of it to contaminate us! In fact, we will arrange our organisation in such a way that contact with us weakens and vanquishes it! Boooooo to Evil!”

That isn’t Mr Schmidt’s line at all. Evil works, so while he doesn’t want to be actually Evil, he’s apparently happy to nuzzle up against Evil (or as he puts it, ‘creepy’) and learn from it. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying he’s a bad guy. He’s not. That’s the sucky thing about Evil. It works on good people too.

It’s not Come To The Dark Side. In this context, the Dark Side will happily come to you.

Two things have happened this morning which are insanely annoying.

The first is that some cerebrally-challenged tobacco fetishist - who I devoutly trust will eventually succumb to some species of smoking-related sexual disfunction and be found dry-humping a dustbin full of rat corpses and arrested for bestiality and spend the rest of his or her life unjustly being refused employment on the basis that they are a sex offender – accidentally set my house on fire.

This happens quite a lot, so please don’t be alarmed. Basically, outside my home there’s one of those gratings in the pavement which make London look really sixties – the kind of glass-brick thingies with the little holes for ventilation or whatever. I have no earthly idea what function they are intended to serve. However. The function they do serve is that smokers who have been exiled from their workplaces cluster over them and smoke and shove their fag-ends down the little holes in some incredibly Freudian penetrative/oral thing I don’t wish to know about. They believe that this does not constitute littering, because littering is about throwing stuff onto the street and this magically makes the fag vanish into a hole in the ground. That there is a rubbish bin ten yards away apparently escapes them entirely. I suspect they worry about setting it on fire.

Newsflash, you brain-addled drug fiends: that issue is not restricted to litter bins. It is also relevant to my goddam house.

Below the sixties doodad, you see, there is a little alcove which looks like some kind of spider-jungle or ghastly post-apocalyptic landscape. Into this cramped space fall all the fag ends, mostly still lit. And from time to time they ignite the other fag ends and detritus down there.

The issue is that for some godforesaken and unknowable reason, my house has a window onto this alcove. It is, praise Cthulhu, frosted, so I don’t have to look at the appalling pit of vipers and mutant insects and human slag. However, when it ignites, the house fills with the scent of burning and little coils of smoke, and I go down with a bucket of water and douse the whole lot for safety, because occasionally it does seem that the blaze might spread into the utility room and – above and beyond stinking up all my clothes and making me want to scream at someone – actually destroy everything I own, consume my new novel, and do harm to my beloved wife.

There is no Hell deep enough, people, for anyone who causes grief to Mrs H. I wish this to be understood very clearly.

The sad thing is that by definition, those responsible have wandered off in a blissful little haze of selfish, fatuous warmth, ready to get on with their day now that they’ve satisfied their third-world blighting, money devouring, health destroying craving on my doorstep and messed up my house and my day.

Therefore I cannot scream at them for being evil. I cannot know who they are without erecting a surveillance camera and turning into a slathering maniac.

I have taken a picture. You can’t really see properly, but you get the idea. I could have opened the window to show you, but it’s frankly disgusting and also smells of burning fag end and moss and incinerated genetically modified carcinogenic spider flambé, so I didn’t. I have standards.

[Deep breath...]

The second annoying thing is that I have once again forgotten the word which means a designed object owing its shape to an earlier instance of a technology – like the QWERTY keyboard, which is the shape it is because of hammer keys on typewriters.

Help.