My new work laptop is mostly the way I like it now, but it has one issue that the old one didn’t have. It came with a background image of the view from a window of the New York corporate office. That seemed okay at first, and I don’t look at the background much when I’m working anyway; but I soon realized it made more of a difference than I thought.

I use a large monitor with the laptop off to the side, and I’ve always had landscape images as my background. Having the city office image in my peripheral vision, rather than a peaceful landscape, left me feeling slightly unsettled. So, I went to Settings to change the background, only to find that setting was grayed out, and nobody else who had gotten a new laptop had the ability to change it either.

My first thought was that someone in management had gotten the weird idea that forcing everyone to have the same office background would build corporate solidarity. Then I started wondering if maybe there had been complaints about somebody at the office having inappropriate background pictures.

When I mentioned it to my husband, he suggested running Photos as administrator to change the background, but it wasn’t allowing that either. I decided that as a workaround, I would just leave Photos open on the laptop screen with whatever image I wanted. This is what it looks like now:

There is an employee survey ongoing, and I’m going to write a comment about how much a calming, restful background image improves my work environment and productivity. I don’t know how useful that will be, but it can’t do any harm.

Although this may seem like a small issue, there are so many not-quite-right little things in our modern world causing low-level anxiety, I try to be proactive about making improvements when I can.