How did that happen

I'm fairly tech smart; not as smart as some but way ahead of many!  I don't have a fancy phone, just one that goes ring ring and text text.  As much as I would love to have a new phone I know that if I did I would spend way too much time messing around with it because that is what I do with the computer.  I spend way too much time piddling around, wasting time and I love it!  I also have a Zune and a Kindle and an aging laptop.  You know, gadgets and gizmos! I finally gave in to temptation; however, and bought a netbook.  My justification for the purchase was that I could take it to school or when I traveled and have access to my e-mail and the internet.  I ordered it off Amazon and it was quickly delivered to my door (magic, huh) and my credit card charged, too!

But when it arrived I realized that if I wasn't careful I would get way too wrapped up in getting it set up and spend too many hours messing with it. I managed to not spend too much time working on it but realized last week that if I was going to take it to the Reliant Show I needed to buy Microsoft Office and get my e-mail set up.  

But before I did that I tackled another project.  I had set up a g-mail address to use just for dog stuff and for the steward's club correspondence.  But honestly, the g-mail format was driving me crazy and I just did not want to mess with it.  So I printed up instructions on how to bring the g-mail through Outlook.  The instructions were great and in just a minute or two it was done.  I felt like the Queen of Internet!  Feeling real good about that I tackled getting Microsoft onto the new netbook and in sync with my addresses.

I used Amazon again (cheapest deal I could find) but first mistake was that I chose to download instead of getting the key.  I knew full well that the netbook was preloaded and all I needed was the key.  As soon as I clicked "download" I realized what I had done.  What was I thinking?  Three hours to download and it was already after 9:30 p.m.  I was afraid to try to stop it so, I stayed up late that night.  

Download worked and I got the little wizard to come up to complete the profile.   Should have been easy but after several attempts I gave up and went to bed.  Next morning I tried again, still no luck.  I kept getting an error message that said to contact my service provider.  I had to move on to other things but kept thinking about the steps that I followed and why it wasn't working.  I loaded up the netbook anyway and headed to Houston thinking that it would be an excellent project to work on in the hotel.  

Now here's what I can't figure out:  when I turned the computer on and tried to open Outlook, guess what...it opened right up.  Everything was just fine, not sure what the problem had been but somehow Outlook fixed itself.  I just had to set up the instructions to send/receive e-mail through AT&T.   I went to AT&T's support site and looked up their instructions about setting up e-mail.  Since I didn't have a printer I took notes and then went back to Outlook.  I entered everything just the way I did the times before and to my amazement, it worked!  How did that happen?

To conclude this long story I felt so confident that I set up the g-mail account on the netbook, too.  Success, well almost.  I missed dinner with some of the stewards because I was stuck in internet land and then the internet service in the hotel was intermittent so I couldn't do too much in the way of setting up other things on the netbook.  Just as well, I didn't want to miss any other dinners!