Perils of technology

Same old story...buy the goods [hardware/software] and the tech support seams to have vanished and nothing but frustration builds. The following is an online post from a colleague expressing such frustration. The point is that some technological goods are cool if they are supported by the company that develops them. Never had this problem with a box of Crayons.

The reason for my sad desperation for email was that I had logged a problem with Adobe about both Acrobat 8 Professional and Adobe Creative Suite CS2. They are all unusable on my new laptop. I particularly needed Illustrator and ImageReady (fortunately my Photoshop CS4 is working fine) for logo and header designs that I'm working on at the moment.

When my old Sony laptop started to suffer from dementia I ordered myself a new one and deactivated all my Adobe applications on the old Sony, as per Adobe's instructions. The deactivation program told me that I had successfully deactivated my applications. Jolly good. I then loaded my software onto my new laptop. And then I tried to launch the applications on the new machine.

Each and every one of my Acrobat and CS2 applications comes up with a message saying that I have too many instances of that serial number activated. That would certainly be the case if I hadn't deactivated them all on my old laptop - but I did. So I cruised around the Abdobe site and eventually found a way of raising a problem form. I won't take you through the next few parts of the email conversation I had, but eventually I got the woman to understand that I had CS2 (not CS3, which I registered but no longer have), and that the problem impacted both CS2 and Acrobat. Her email said that she understood my frustration with my non-functioning software and would investigate further.

The next thing I heard from them was an email to check my open query on their website, so at 1am on my painfully slow BTFon connection I limped along to Adobe and viewed their update. There was no update. No comments had been added, no explanations were forthcoming, no advice was given. Instead, the ticket status had been changed from "open" to "withdrawn". There was no way of responding to this, no way of querying it, no email address, no link to click. Just a dead end.

My next step was to raise a new issue form with the number of the previous one in the header. I explained that my previous issue was NOT resolved, that I had not withdrawn it and I was still without either CS2 or Acrobat. Would they please get back to me with some sort of information that would help? Apparently they wouldn't. Because they didn't. That was two days ago and I haven't heard a single thing from them.

It has been a week now, since I first contacted them and I'm nowhere further to getting my apps up and running.

Adobe's software is too expensive to be supported by this dismal level of customer service and technical support and I am wholly disgusted with them.