Held hostage by Adobe for $39.00? A tip that might work for other software too.

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

John Posada reported problems with an Acrobat installation, and specifically
with Adobe's annoying habit of charging US$39 per "incident" for telephone
support. I recently ran across this with a PageMaker upgrade that I couldn't
get to install because it wouldn't recognize the serial number from my old
version. Searching their Web site proved an exercise in futility. Let's hear
it for search engines, right?

Then I had a brainstorm. Rather than contacting their tech support staff and
racking up the credit card bills, I submitted my problem as a _bug report_
via the Adobe Web site, and described the bug's seriousness as a "show
stopper". That's not a lie: Because I couldn't install the software, I
couldn't get it to work, and personally, I consider that a bug. <g> The bug
squashers got back to me in about a day with a clear, simple solution--they
even telephoned me to discuss it.

I won't promise you that this will always work, but it's certainly worth a
try if you can afford to wait a day or two and if the company staff are as
friendly and helpful as Adobe's were. As the sign in the police station's
towed vehicles department says, "please don't yell at the guy behind the
counter because you're annoyed--he's not the one who wrote the law, nor is
he the one who towed your vehicle". Same applies to software company staff.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 

"Wisdom is one of the few things that look bigger the further away it
is."--Terry Pratchett

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