The Worst Case of the Mondays

On Monday my computer died, just a few months out of warranty and in the worst possible month for an unexpected expense. This marked the beginning of what was the most frustrating day of my life. Everything that could go wrong that day, did. None of my other technology gadgets worked right, everything took 10x as long to complete and with no shortage of glitches and bumps. Something as simple as replying to a client e-mail turned into a drawn out ordeal.

It was such a frustrating day that by the afternoon I gave up trying to get anything done and just resigned myself to eating junk food while waiting for my husband to get home so I could have a drink.  I even tried to bake a cake for comfort food and that was a mission full of glitches!  At least the end result was still edible.

All symptoms pointed to a motherboard failure and upon opening the case I verified the location of a short on the board. This led to an impromptu homeschooling lesson about the different components of a computer and their roles.

Estimated repair cost minimum of $300 (based on cost of refurbished motherboard and average rates for local techs).

Given that this snafu cost me $400 in lost revenue (new client dumped me like a hot potato when he found out I wouldn’t be able to start on the scheduled date) and potentially more if I was down for too long, I decided that it would be worth it to use my new credit card with 0% interest rate to replace it. I still didn’t want to spend too much on it and I was stressing about finding the cheapest system with the minimum specs I needed. I do a lot of multitasking with resource intensive programs so I couldn’t just grab the cheapest system off the shelf and expect it to work. Talk about stress!

Just as I was creating a spreadsheet comparing prices and specs from different models and not being thrilled about my options I got an e-mail from Staples advertising savings of up to $280 on select Desktops. I wasn’t expecting the model with the biggest discount to have the minimum specs that I needed so I was very surprised when it did! And the warranty included was better than the one from the more expensive systems that I was looking at.

So for $299, pretty much the same price that I would have had to pay to repair my old machine, I got a new desktop with 2 year warranty that I was able to pickup the same day instead of waiting 7-10 business days for delivery, that was 49% off the regular price!  All of my files were safe in the cloud so aside from losing Quickbooks everything else is safe.

Plus add 2% cash back from Ebates, 1.5% cash back from the credit card and 5% Staples Rewards, I think I got a great deal.

Now I am doing my best to get back into business soon so I can get gigs to pay off the debt quickly.