I write these stories because I believe business is just another kind of magic—and because Cheryl said I needed to stop monologuing at enchanted tea kettles in the middle of the chow hall and start processing my thoughts in writing. So here I am - covered in ink, missing a shoe, and somehow holding some else’s pen - where did my enchanted quill go? Welcome to the inside of my brain. Please watch your step. 🐾🌪️💸
👕 Enchanted Merch | 🦋 Fly away with me! | 🗺️ Go on a Side Quest
"Ophelia," Darla said gently, "why are you whispering into the toaster?"
"It’s not a toaster. It’s a document workspace. Obviously."
She blinked at me. I blinked back. One of us blinked in a different font.
We were in the Business Witch Academy student lounge—a cozy disaster of tea leaves, tangled ethernet cables, and sentient scrolls that keep trying to unionize. I had converted the central study table into a command center of AI experimentation. Floating holograms of PDF thumbnails were orbiting my head like over-caffeinated moons. Mortimer, my prone-to-existential-crises-squirrel-familiar-slash-spiritual/business-advisor, was perched on the edge of a stack of unsigned NDAs, eating what might have been a contract.
“I stayed up all night,” I announced, arms wide like a stage magician revealing a rabbit made of spreadsheets. “Introducing—Ophelia’s Adobe PDF Spaces of Strategic Clarity and Possibly Regret!”
A third-year enchantment student snorted milk out of her nose. I didn't realize it yet, but Cheryl was, at that moment, just passing through, and paused outside my attention span. She just sipped her coffee and waited.
“I’ve uploaded seventy-eight documents. Categorized them by project type, urgency, threat level, and how much emotional damage they do when opened.”
I gestured dramatically. “Then I asked the AI to summarize the entire ‘client disaster from spring equinox’ folder, cross-reference it with three vendor contracts, and draft a refund policy that doesn’t sound like it was written by a disgruntled mushroom!”
“You mean like your last one?” Cheryl said without looking up. “‘No Refunds, No Regrets, No Contact Spells After Sundown’?”
“That was a vibe!” I squawked.
“It was a lawsuit.”
“Allegedly.”
She raised an eyebrow.
I chose to ignore her and launched into evangelist mode. “But this—this is the future! No more tab apocalypse! No more ‘Final_FINAL_REALLYFINAL2’ files! Just...upload, ask, get answers. It even does summaries with citations. Like footnotes, but sassier!”
Cheryl tilted her head slightly, that infuriatingly gentle smile playing at the corners of her mouth—the one that says, I’m not judging you, but also… I know exactly what’s happening here.
“Hey, quick question,” she said, stepping into the chaos orbit of my workspace. “You use a spreadsheet to track your suppliers, right?”
I nodded, still aglow with the unearned confidence of someone who hasn’t tested anything but already believes.
“Can this integrate live with your Google Sheets?”
Pause. "I, well, uh, I'm not sure. I haven't tried that yet. But I'm sure it does! How can it not?"
“Mmm,” she said, not with skepticism but with that tone that suggests she knows something that I clearly don't. “Ok, you should make a note to look into that. And you’ve trained ChatGPT to sound exactly like you, with all the sparkle and dragon metaphors. Does this do that?”
I shifted uncomfortably. “I can… copy-paste things into other tools…”
“Sure," she nodded. "And how many files can live in each PDF Space?”
“One hundred,” I proclaimed proudly, as if I hadn’t just uploaded seventy-eight files and labeled them things like ‘Mildly Traumatizing But Important’ and ‘DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT A SNACK.’
Cheryl sipped her coffee. "How many files are on your Google Drive?"
“...Unclear,” I muttered. “Somewhere between ‘respectable’ and ‘digital hoarder.’”
“I see. And your new sticker designs? The ones with the glitter-bats and enchanted font chaos? Can this tool read image files and write product descriptions the way ChatGPT does?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it with a soft wheeze that sounded like excitement escaping from a balloon at a pre-birthday party setup shindig.
"I have one last question. I'm not looking for an answer, it just one for you to ponder," she said without gloating, "What problem with your current system were you trying to solve?"
Her eye held compassionate, but the question made me want to eat my keyboard, and not in a candy coated, the clacking is satisfying sort of way.
But also…
I got it.
She wasn’t poking holes—she was holding up a mirror. And I, predictably, had spellcrafted an entire new system because it felt like forward motion. Like progress. Like transformation in a tidy, UI-optimized box. But if I was fixing a system that wasn't broken, was that really progress? Or just a hamster wheel of busi…wait, Busy ness? No. Busy-ness? Bus-i-ness…Business is also the word busy-ness?
Smoke errupted out of my ears. I think my brain might have just exploded.
Cheryl took that moment to wander off, coffee still in hand, as if she hadn’t just dismantled my entire existential filing system in five questions and a raised eyebrow.
Scrambling to shove my smoldering brain back into my head, I barely managed a whisper as she walked away, "How?"
She turned back to me, looking slightly more amused, like she was in on an inside joke, only I didn't know what the joke was. "Hmm?"
"How do you do it?"
"Do what?" she asked, innocently, as if she didn't know.
"How do you know about every new technology before anyone else? How do you know what mistakes I've made and more so, why I've done it? How do you know me better than me?" I gushed, and maybe whined a little.
She might have sighed a little. "Truth?"
I shook my head. I noticed several other students nodding too. I think we were hoping she'd reveal the true secret to her business magic.
"I don't? I've been there done that? I can see the threads that interweave and connect everything in this universe forming patterns that most people can't see?"
Her answers sounded more like a bunch of questions, like maybe I'd know the real answer. I just stared at her. No one moved. No one said anything. Maybe she was joking? We were waiting for the big reveal.
She smiled in a way that seemed more wistful than mischievous, which I didn't understand considering what she said next. "Maybe I've just lived a thousand lives inside the span of a single human life, hoping through time, like you do Ophelia, and ultimately there's nothing new under the sun."
She turned then and walked away.
We were all silent for a beat, still trying to make sense of what she said. Then Mortimer, apparently finished eating my contract, blurted out, "That might have been the best non-answer I've ever heard!" He scurried off. Probably on the hunt for some acorns to wash down that legalese. I've heard it can be pretty bitter.
So, what did we learn?
One: Mortimer will eat anything, including NDAs, which probably makes him an accessory to fraud. And maybe a racoon.
Two: Cheryl has the unnerving ability to make my brain explode just by sipping coffee and asking five very polite questions.
And three: not every shiny tool is meant to be my salvation. Some are just tinsel in disguise.
Ping! "You've Got Mail!" Cheryl just sent me a link to an article. I'm not sure if she wrote this before our conversation today or if she whipped it up, but the article is called: "Adobe Just Dropped PDF Spaces. Here’s What Small Business Owners Need to Know (Without the Hype)." I'm going to go read this, you probably should too.
The truth is—I’ll probably chase another dopamine goblin tomorrow. Maybe you will too. That’s okay. Because every detour, every midnight filing cabinet reinvention, every whispered toaster—turns into a story, a lesson, a breadcrumb on the weird, sparkly trail of running a business that doesn’t quite fit the template.
So if your tech stack feels like a hydra with too many heads, maybe don’t burn it all down for the next shiny promise. Maybe just…boop the goblin on the nose and ask Cheryl to help you figure out what's already working and how to make it work better. She can solve more problems in 30 minutes than a workshop full of elves. So if your tech is more headache than heck yeah, book a call with her. I'll drop her link down below.
Until next time—stay weird, stay magical, and for the love of glitter, label your folders.
🪄Adobe Just Dropped PDF Spaces. Here’s What Small Business Owners Need to Know (Without the Hype)
Not Today, Dopamine Goblin! Ok, Maybe Today. Thanks Adobe!
Ophelia 🌈
Recovering Tech-acholic
👕 Enchanted Merch | 🦋 Fly away with me! | 🗺️ Go on a Side Quest
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