I am aware that grey is the trendy color now, but my favorite of all colors is yellow. My office is a bold yellow, the color of sunflowers. As I sit in my new comfy chair at my new desk typing away at my old laptop, I have to laugh. I came home from a recent writers’ conference really pumped and ready to get some serious work done; thus my new office furniture.

I tend to procrastinate and work hard to be organized, but it is work indeed. With excitement over many writing projects that I would whip out in record time, I took the big step of totally overhauling my office. The most expensive purchase was a new Apple desktop. It cost quite a bit, but I considered it an investment.

The computer had to be loaded with software and set up for me. It took a couple of days, but in my excited state, it seemed like a week. At last I had my computer sitting in its place of prominence on my new desk. I let out a contented sigh dreaming of how efficient I would be with my new big-screen monitor. Maybe I can increase the print size large enough on this big screen that I won’t have to wear my cheater glasses.

For the two weeks since I hit Best Buy and Office Depot, my dreams of organizing all my work, saving it on the Cloud, and keeping account of everything I send out on a spreadsheet have turned into a nightmare! Each time I have tried to work on my new desktop, something weird happened. I felt totally inept after a while and finally hired a friend’s grown son to come over and help me out.

My tech-savvy young friend reloaded my software and set everything up again. It had been set up and loaded before I left the store, so I didn’t quite understand why we needed to do it again. But I was so thankful to finally have everything ready to go the next day that I asked no questions. All my passwords were neatly written on a notepad for my convenience, and I slept soundly that night knowing my computer problems were a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of my computer drama! The next day everything went haywire again. After two more calls to the Geek Squad, the tech finally decided that someone needed to come to my home to check things out. The only problem with that was the considerable cost.

I had already spent more than I wanted to. Finally, I was fed up! I put the computer in my backseat and took it back. Turns out they had inadvertently loaded the wrong software on it. By this time I just wanted a refund. I did, however, get the correct new software to load on my trusty laptop. It took a while, but now I’m organized and ready to go. If only I could find my glasses!

Jan Penton Miller can be reached at lilsisjan@yahoo.com.