Last night, I flew home to London from Hamburg, near Germany. The flight was punctual and uneventful enough apart from the fact I was sitting next to a blind man.

When the seat belts sign extinguished, he got his laptop out, booted up and started typing into a completely black screen. So, I assumed he must be blind and using a braille keyboard.

However, this gentleman wasn’t blind. He had been reading ‘High Life’ while we taxied onto the runway. Oh and he also had a complimentary copy of the Financial Times.

There was only one conclusion - this was a security measure to stop inquisitive neighbours peeping at his screen and reading confidential documents and email correspondence.

This could only mean one thing - the gentleman worked for a Government agency, probably MI6 or was the CEO of a FTSE100 company.

Although it killed my last three cats, two hamsters and seventeen tropical fish, curiosity got the better of me and I painstakingly reverse engineered all of my neighbour’s typing by analysing his actual keystrokes in real-time.

Here is the exclusive transcript…

To: Sebastian Browning (VP marketing)
Cc: UK Marketing
Subject: logistics for Partner Golf day

Due to the current ‘difficult and challenging times’, the Partner Golf day at The Old Course, St Andrews has been cancelled. However, as I know a lot of you had customers booked and after my pledge to do ‘anything it takes’, I am delighted to tell you an alternative, lower cost venue has been found.

We will now meet at Solihull municipal Crazy Golf course at 2pm on Friday 28 November. Looking forward to meeting you and your customers. Alan will send handicaps and pairings out next week.

There now followed a 5 minute lull - no typing - just a frenzy of trackerball activity punctuated by various muttered expletives. The most likely cause was the poor individual trying to resize a picture within a Microsoft Word document. Then back to the 782 messages lying in ‘Inbox’.

To: Bernard Barnstormworth (Director Fins)
Subject: status on Megabank opportunity

Megabank is dead. The client was expecting to be hosted at The Emirates to see Arsenal versus Manchester United followed by dinner at The Ivy. What they got was a mini-bus to Leyton Orient against Hartlepool and some cockles and mussels at half-time. The CEO just called me to say the deal is off.

Another pause for thought to consume a cheese sandwich and a glass of water.

To: Hannah Brown (IT security)
Subject: privacy and security

Hannah - As per your recent memo, my two hard disks are now fully encrypted and I have affixed the privacy screen overlay to my laptop. I must say it is absolutely fantastic to be able to work without idiots gawping at my screen, trying to read my email and watching me visit those dodgy Web sites.

PS. Please can you order me a new 4GB USB memory stick ? I can’t find it anywhere. Must have lost it in Hamburg.