danny’s space

What does $700 buy you these days? Adobe CS3 Master Collection student edition that can’t be activated. And what happens if you try to activate via telephone and stay on the line after the computer voice with an English accent tells you that you’ll be transferred to a customer service representative because your activation was unsuccessful? Yes, you get transferred to India, home to all the customer service representatives in the world.

I spoke with someone named “Jade” (obviously not her real name) who couldn’t help much and had to “escalate” this issue and gave me a reference number. In fact, she insisted that my serial number didn’t need activating, until I finally convinced her that I was looking at an activation screen. Nothing happened for a while, and I called back and spoke to “Gracie” who more helpfully informed me that many CS3 Master Collections were experiencing this problem, and told me to use the 30-day activation grace period until Adobe figures things out.

Not the worst experience with Indian call centres I must say. The time when I had to ring HP support (transferred to India) was relatively pleasant as well.

Hopefully Adobe pulls its fingers out from where the sun don’t shine and fixes this issue before the grace period expires and many users are left with a 25gb lead weight on the hard disks. You’d expect more from a company that sells this kind of software to professionals.