What Do You Do When You Come Face To Face With Obstacles?

THIS POST WAS UPDATED ON 8.5.2021

Sometimes life runs along smoothly but at other times, no matter how good your best intentions were, we come face to face with obstacles along the way. These obstacles try to deter your every effort from achieving your goal.
This is what happened…

I was going along working on my 90 Day Blogging challenge. I was doing really well posting new content daily and I had reached 50 days of daily consecutive posting. Quite an achievement if I may say so myself so was feeling really pleased with the effort and how the site, The Digital Mum was developing.

Then this happened on Day 50 — Go read my blog post

No matter that you have the best intentions and no matter how well you are going there are always the challenges that you will face ahead.

Now this was no major challenge by any means in the grand scheme of life but enough to cause a pause, a slight delay in the way that I was working and producing daily blog content.
With no computer to work on – I felt … stuck.

Not having a computer was a slight obstacle but where there is a will there is always a way — you can always find a way to access to a computer.

For one there are still the local libraries that allow you to access the internet for an hour and for free,
There’ s internet cafés and of course I am sure we all have at least one friend who would allow you come in and post to your blog so there is really no excuse for why my blog post lay empty for several days.
Yes, I could have but I didn’ t.

Here’ s why, I was so frustrated with not having my trusty laptop.
There was this connection when I turned it on — I knew where all my stuff was
I was able to think and process information for my posts.
It was easy but all of a sudden it all felt overwhelming.
I sat at foreign computers and it felt like I was cheating in a way

So there was only one thing to do when you are faced with an obstacle.

Follow up on the progress of the repair of my laptop.

Thankfully, it wasn’ t too serious no hardware malfunction, no viruses just some connections that had come lose (probably from all the trips to the coffee shop where I enjoy working), and it just needed to be soldered.
This simple job took no less than… wait for it a week.

Yes, a whole week before I received a call to say that my computer was ready to collect.
So I was kinda excited when I receive the call. I rushed off to pick it up. Paid for the repair and went to my car.
Then something said ‘Heh, you haven’ t even checked that it is working, they told you it is working but how do you know it is’ .

Call it intuition or suspicion but I turned on the old trusty laptop and nothing.
It was still dead as a door nail.

So I went back into the store and explained the issue of a working computer that was still not working.
They agreed that it the working computer was indeed not working and needed more soldering at a higher heat and they promised to have it fixed by the next day.

The next day, I collect the said trusty laptop and turned it on in the store and it was working. It booted up and icons showed on the screen. So off I went home.

When I arrived home, I clicked on the icons to open up my internet browser.
Nothing?
I tried other icons.
Still nothing.

The computer was turning on alright but nothing was working.

So it was another trip back to the store to explain the problem.

Then they tell me that they fixed the hardware problem but this is a software problem and therefore guess what they have to charge me again.

Let’ s say I was not very happy to be charged again.

Surely I asked if I brought a laptop that was dead then if you fixed it, it should be working when I collect it? But when you returned it to me and it was still not working then you didn’ t fix it?

Anyway they spin me some story that it is because I downloaded Windows 10 to this laptop and the operating system cannot take it — which in my view is a total load of rubbish – after all when I went to download Windows 10 my computer was checked to see if it was compatible for the download which it was.

So I left my laptop there against my better judgement and a week later I had heard nothing back from this company. So I called them up again and eventually after some moments they were able to locate my laptop and no it had not been worked on at all from the sounds of it.

I was promised a telephone call later on that afternoon as someone with the promise that someone would start working on it straight away and it should be ready by the end of the day.

Well the afternoon rolled on,
4pm — nothing,
5 pm still nothing.
6pm nothing and now they are closed.
They did not bother to call back at all.
So, I am still without said laptop.

And have not been very pleased with the service provided at RL Computers, Hertfordshire especially as they had come by way of recommendation.

At this stage of the process they will get a one * rating because they were conveniently close by but the service provided has been mediocre at best and I have been charged twice to fix one laptop because there are two problems.
RL Computers seem friendly enough and the guy running it seems to know his stuff but maybe they are taking on too much work and they cannot satisfy customers due to the slow turnaround and quality of the work they are doing.
Two weeks to fix a laptop in 2015?

I thought that we were in the Digital World. The digital era.

That is my moan for the day and why I have not been blog posting as frequently as I had planned.

I don’ t want to have to go to the library.
I don’ t want to go to an internet café.
I don’ t want to beg or borrow a computer from a friends

All I want is my laptop back fixed and ready so that I can start blogging again.

We are all faced by obstacles at some point in our lives, some big and some small.

What do you do when you are faced by obstacles in your life?