Meeting our IT guys is rarely a thrill-a-minute at the best of times, but my heart sank this week when Ace and I turned up for a progress report on our new platform, and discovered that our regular project manager wasn't there. Since this guy has an assistant who's also working on it full-time, this theoretically shouldn’t have mattered - except that the assistant appears to communicate in an entirely different language. I mean, I understand the individual words he's using (or at least most of them); he just doesn't seem to string them together in any recognisable way. Maybe he keeps slipping into C++or something.

I don’t know if I’ve just been unlucky, but I seem to have met a lot of IT people like this. Our regular guy is great – he can explain whatever’s going on in plain, non-patronising English, and he can turn whatever it is we want him to do into some kind of whizzy code that means nothing to us. Which is precisely what you want in your IT supplier.

However, he’s an exception. More often than not, I’ve ended up with people who just spout incomprehensible jargon and ridiculous acronyms, presumably on the basis that you'll be blinded with science and thus too clueless to argue with them. I strongly suspect that it’s worse because I’m a woman, although maybe that’s just me being a bit Germaine Greer. Either way, it seriously winds me up. I don’t generally react well to being patronised, particularly by someone who’s spent their entire formative years in a darkened room wearing black T-shirts.

The thing is, I'm convinced IT isn’t actually that complicated (not least given some of the people who’ve managed to get jobs in the industry). During my early days as an entrepreneur, when I was too penniless to afford IT support, I even ended up having to fix a few computers myself (and when I realised that 95% of problems can be solved by turning your computer off and on again, I decided there and then never to waste money on expensive IT support). So I’m not a complete ignoramus in these matters; I know one end of a motherboard from another. Nor am I an idiot – which means there’s no excuse for someone not being able to explain things in a way that I can understand.

Now I’m sure there are lots of great IT people around (some of my best friends, and all that). But because it’s a technical discipline, the development side generally attracts people with hard quanty skills – and it’s rare that these people have the ‘softer’ people skills to match. So you end up with techno-geeks in client-facing roles, which can be a challenge for the likes of me. It’s also a challenge for their employer, because let’s face it – it doesn’t matter how great your product is if you can’t communicate that to people. This bloke might have been telling me that we’ve just accidentally invented a better version of Google, and I wouldn’t have had a clue what he was talking about.

Then again, I suppose I’m in the same boat with Ace and my new venture. No matter how fantastic I think the idea is, its success will basically comes down to the ability of a man I barely know to convince other people of the same thing. Let's hope he’s up to it.