Those problems

Have you ever had one of those problems? The type that just won’t go away? You try one strategy after another, but every step you take forward is followed by another step back? The perpetual battle makes you feel like the world is conspiring against you. This one problem has driven you to the edge of your patience eliminating any extra space for other challenges. All of your brilliant plans to solve this problem have failed to work out. You thought you had all of the spinning plates of your busy life under control and then THAT problem plate fell and knocked the rest down in a domino chain reaction. We all have one of those problems. I dealt with one just last week.

The Hard Drive Problem Child

I bought a new laptop in May. Top of the line, best laptop I could find. I was planning to use it for work and knew that the stakes were high. When you coach college students using video conferencing and your laptop isn’t working, it’s awfully hard to work at all! Almost immediately after I bought the laptop, the hard drive was full. “Disappointing, but not a major problem,” I thought. I bought an external hard drive and continued working, but the hard drive continued to fill repeatedly even though there was nothing on it but Windows and a few office applications. Every week, I spent an hour or two battling for space on the hard drive, deleting files, purchasing cloud storage space, removing temp files, changing browser cookie settings. Each week I thought I had solved the problem and was proven wrong. Each battle was more frustrating than the last; each hour of lost productivity was more maddening; each failed strategy made me more determined to fix this problem once and for all.

Last Thursday, I pulled out the big guns and made an appointment with a local electronics repair shop. I know when I am beaten and need to call in reinforcements. Overnight it snowed; the roads were terrible. My son’s school bus didn’t show up so I had to drive him to school which conflicted with my computer repair appointment. When I finally got there the street parking was blocked off for construction, I had to park a block away on a snow-covered street and hike on the un-shoveled sidewalk. When I finally got to the store the woman who worked there told me that they don’t work on hard drives. Can you hear those spinning plates crashing down all around me?

Crashing plates

The sound of those plates crashing was my signal to evaluate the situation. I had a couple of choices. I could yell at the poor woman who broke the we-don’t-work-on-hard drives news to me. This might have been satisfying for a moment but wouldn’t have been fair or kind and wouldn’t have solved the problem. I could have logged into Twitter and ranted to cyber space. This also might have been satisfying, but still would not have solved the problem. I could have stomped out the door, slipped and slid my way back home and kept trying to fix it myself. A slightly more productive option, but also, would not have solved the problem.

I decided instead to get back in my car and drive to Best Buy. My patience was running short and my nerves were jangling from the din of all of those falling plates so when I got to Best Buy and found that they didn’t open for another 45 minutes I was tempted to turn around and quit. But still, not solving the problem… I waited in my car until they opened and gave my laptop to the Geek Squad. Ever optimistic I returned home to salvage the rest of my workday using the ancient laptop I had been using before I replaced it with the hard drive problem child. Every application I opened closed itself at random intervals without saving the files I was working on for the rest of the day. Oh yeah, that’s why I bought the new laptop.

Moral of the story

This is a day I would rather not re-live, but it holds so many valuable lessons, I felt I needed to share it. There were a lot of decision points through the day as there often are when things go wrong. Some of those decisions have more productive outcomes while others are more immediately satisfying. Making consistently wise and mature decisions can help us solve our problems if we can muster the fortitude to follow through on them.

We can choose to respond with anger, with sadness, with frustration, with resignation, with pessimism, with anxiety, or with ranting. If you have ever witnessed a toddler throwing a tantrum, you understand what I’m talking about. We’ve all been there! These reactions, while momentarily satisfying and often knee-jerk automatic, are rarely helpful in solving the problem and making things better.

We can also choose to respond with acceptance, with grace, with optimism, with positive action, with humor, with perspective, with creativity, with an appeal for help, with compassion, with openness, or with persistence. It’s so hard to reach for these calm, mature, productive responses when the plates are crashing all around us. When chaos ensues, making a mess of our well-laid plans, equanimity is often the last response which comes to mind even though it is the one most likely to lead us out of our problem and back to a place of balance and control so we can get all of those plates spinning again.

Taking back control

When I am tempted to take the mental shortcut of responding to my problems with negative emotions, I try to take action to fix the problem instead. Having a bias toward action makes me feel more powerful. Rather than dwelling on a problem and allowing it to keep me down, I do something to start moving in the direction of fixing it. The action I take doesn’t always solve the problem, but it does make me feel that I have a bit more control over the situation. That empowerment helps to keep me moving forward and looking for new options. The more options I try, the more likely I am to find one which works so I can get myself back on track.

How do you respond to those persistent problems? What do you do when the plates start crashing down around you?

P.S. Happy ending

The Geek Squad returned my laptop three days later, better than new with nearly 50% of the hard drive capacity free. Who knew that Windows back up and restore files which are supposed to be compressed could go rogue, escape the compression process, and eat your hard drive? Not me. I’ve never been so grateful to have a functioning computer!