Look at our service centre's workload statistics and one pattern stands out sharply: the number of machines arriving spikes dramatically in the first two or three weeks of the rainy season, every year.

The reason is not that rain breaks machines. It is that this is when everybody retrieves the machine they stored all dry season and discovers it does not work.

This article therefore sets out a 20-point checklist that organisations and businesses can run before the rainy season, marking which items you can do yourself and which need a technician, so you are not queueing in the week everyone needs their machine at once.