There’s a common question which is “why do bad things happen to good people?”
(For some time I’ve been working on a book by that title and it’s still a work in progress.)
Often things which appear to be bad when we’re going through them ultimately turn out to be better than we could have imagined.
This week I had a great example of exactly that scenario.
An IT client had been using an old laptop computer.
A lot of time and money had been spent on keeping it running and on a number of occasions I’d recommended that it be replaced.
However, even though I’d pointed out that a new one could be purchased for about five or six hundred dollars, my client wouldn’t consider it.
Recently, a Telstra outage caused havoc with users and from that time the laptop couldn’t be started – it got to the beginning and came up with a message saying “Operating system not found”.
For a computer that’s a pretty dire situation.
After checking the BIOS settings to make sure it wasn’t something simple that had gone wrong in the startup process, the next thing was to decide on a replacement.
Now, this client is one of those people who never throws anything away.
Consequently, there was a desktop model which was even older than the laptop.
It did however start and load Windows (albeit a very old version), which was a distinct improvement over the laptop.
I spent a couple of hours getting it set up with her email and the other apps she needed and left with her happy that it was working.
Within a couple of days she was on the phone needing help because she couldn’t use Office – it was asking for licence information.
Remember, this machine was VERY OLD by computer standards and so the likelihood of finding the licence information was negligible.
A long call (by her) to Microsoft resulted in her purchasing a new licence only to be informed by the support person (who had a very strong accent and so was challenging for anyone, let alone a non-technical person, to understand) that he couldn’t install the new version of Office on her machine because the operating system was too old.
Bit of a Catch 22 really; can’t use Office because the licence needed updating, can’t update the licence because it’s too old.
A call to my technical support man (thanks Angus from Greenlight) confirmed that it wouldn’t be possible to get a licence for that copy of Office because it was so old.
Spending a lot of time and with the angst meter going higher we were getting nowhere.
Until Angus mentioned insurance.
As you know I’m opposed to insurance on principle, but there are times when it does have its value.
This was one of them.
To add a bit more chaos into the mix, the replacement computer stopped working.
(A reminder – never say “things couldn’t possibly get any worse” because sure enough, they will.)
My client contacted NRMA, her provider for household insurance and was informed that she had additional coverage which meant she could get a replacement computer.
The only stipulation was that they organised it through their provider.
SWEET!
NRMA contacted JB HiFi, organised the whole process and all my client needed to do was to go to the store and pick it up – EASY AS…
That afternoon a brand new computer was delivered to me to set up for her.
A few hours later and she’s now the proud owner of a brand new machine, which is fast, efficient and has everything she needs at no cost (except my time for getting it set up) .
While we were going through the challenging process this was an outcome we wouldn’t have foreseen.
Often we find that in life.
What appears to be the worst scenario can often turn out to be the best.
This is obviously a fairly simple example but think about the number of people who’ve lost jobs, relationships which have broken down etc and then a few months or years later they’ve looked back on that event as the trigger resulting in something much better and fulfilling.
Remember; When you’re going through hell, don’t stop. (Attributed to a number of different people. See Quote Investigator for details.)