One of the things I find the most difficult about owning my own business is troubleshooting technical issues with my laptops. Yep, laptops, I have two. Owning two laptops is both a blessing and a curse.

This morning the computer issues I’d experienced last night hadn’t magically resolved themselves, they’d gotten worse. Yesterday I was unable to connect my wireless booster to the network and this morning I can only access a handful of websites from one of my troubled laptops.

My computer saga started last year when instead of the lovely “starting windows” logo my screen said, “cannot start windows.”

This would be scary enough on any given day, it was even worse because I had students scheduled to arrive for a workshop. I started the recovery process, drove home like a madwoman to get my jump drive, and babbled irrationally to my parents about all of the horrible implications if my laptop didn’t recover.

Thankfully it did recover and so did I. The class went well, the laptop behaved, and life carried on. I didn’t take it into Best Buy because I couldn’t be without my laptop and successfully meet my deadlines. So every day, I kept my fingers crossed and hoped that the “cannot start windows” issue was only a fluke.

The approach worked for a few months and then, just days before I was scheduled to fly to St. Louis it happened again. It recovered again, but it became painfully obvious that I needed a back up plan and I headed to my favorite store, Best Buy.

I attempted to keep the feelings of panic at bay and make a good decision about which laptop to purchase as my back up. I reluctantly purchased one with the Windows 8 operating system because I had no other choice.

I took my dead laptop into Best Buy to be diagnosed. Long story short, the solution involved recovery disks and reloading every application from scratch. Two days later, Toshiba released a bug fix for the problem I experienced. At least I wasn’t the only one, knowing that made me feel a little better about the situation.

I had a few months of semi-smooth sailing on the technical front and I was able to resolve issues like installing printer driver updates without too much of an issue. But last month started a new round of issues.

Another full system recovery was required to fix performance issues with my Windows 7 laptop and now it looks like my Windows 8 laptop is going to require a “do-over” as well. :(. I’ll know more after I take it into Best Buy this afternoon. I wonder if they get tired of seeing me?

It’s ironic that my positive affirmation for today is, “I am Joy-full.”

When I created it, I intentionally misspelled joyful. I’m not usually a fan of miss-spellings such as “Kwik” instead of “quick” and other even less appropriate made up words. But in this case, it seems to me that the word joyful should have ended with two “L’s.”

I can’t honestly say that I am full of joy today, I’m frustrated but trying to maintain a positive outlook. I believe that my project of creating and focusing on a positive affirmation every day is making a difference in my outlook on life.

It doesn’t change the fact that I have computer issues that need to be resolved and that there is frustration that goes with it. But the process of actively thinking positive thoughts instead of negative ones is a way to stop  the merry-go-round in a different way.

Frustrating things happen and we can’t control them, but we can control our response to them.

Wish me luck as I try and resolve the next set of technical issues in my world. With any luck I’ll have a funny encounter at Best Buy that will make me smile. 🙂

If you’re interested in seeing the complete collection of journal entries to-date, you can view them here.

Up next is a fun story about a letter writing experience.