What everyone should know when your plan fails

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I’ve been known to panic when I face technology problems. My husband knows better than to get close to me when I am trying to fix a problem with my computer, printer, phone, or anything else related to my business. I growl and complain and sometimes even cry.

Yesterday I woke up to find that QuickBooks quit working. I have used QuickBooks for my accounting program since 1995. It has never failed to start but yesterday, when I tried to open it, I got the message:

Message: QuickBooks has stopped working

I followed all the directions in the link above and none of them changed anything. I had already scheduled a technology consult from Jon at Integratech who had saved my laptop last summer when it was not allowing Microsoft Office to load properly. We reformatted then with Jon doing the reformat and me watching. People who know me well know I live on technology but when it breaks, I turn to the experts.

Jon was as baffled as I was but he researched several steps. He agreed with Jim Connolly’s recommendation to remove my virus protection program and replace it with AVG. We also reinstalled QuickBooks but had no success with that fix either. Jon continued to research the question, using Google to check on possible solutions and delving into fixing .dll files and the like. Finally, he found one solution that looked almost too easy. It said to go into the folder that holds the company files and double-click the company file. We did that and presto, the file changed.

We also changed virus protection and made some other tweaks on the computer but I felt this huge sense of relief.

When you face trouble

It is a guarantee that you will face trouble in life. It goes with the territory. Yesterday, I was less frazzled than usual. Perhaps it was because it was the weekend and I didn’t need the information as badly as I might during the week but I had intended to update QuickBooks and my other financial tracking tools so it was still a disappointment.

I just trusted that Jon would figure it out. Perhaps that is the key. I knew I had an expert available and I knew I could trust him to work at the problem until he figured it out.

My recommendations:

• Stay calm. My normal getting into a frazzle never solved anything and usually made me feel even worse.
• Do your own research to solve the problem.
• If you hit a wall, call an expert. You can’t be expected to know everything so whether it is job search, marketing, accounting, or computer repairs or any other problem you face, call an expert and don’t apologize for asking for help. You are the smart one for knowing that there is help and you can find someone to help you.