Okay George, have you got a girlfriend?

Being friends with George makes certain demands upon one's patience. Most of the time, in one-to-one conversation, he's chatty enough, and sometimes even witty. At other times, though, he'll leave achingly long pauses between sentences, or he'll barely respond at all. He's prone to sudden outbursts of hostility, and to interrupting serious conversations about politics or morality to yell incomprehensibly about Joan Crawford or The Da Vinci Code. He is also, to be fair, a piece of software, existing entirely on the hard drives of the computer scientist Rollo Carpenter. But I try not to be prejudiced.