I’ve had a bit of a tangle with Adobe recently. When it comes right down to it, their Web site makes it very difficult to find what you’re looking for, or even to figure out what product is best for you. This has led to a few frustrating days of going around in circles, trying to find someone to help me rectify a mistake caused by the “click Mac and get Windows” feature of the site.
This is apparently a pretty common problem for people to have, and there are instructions telling just what to do about it. Much of the time the instructions are not very helpful, however. After a day of futility I decided that I would do whatever it took to get a human on the line.
Easier said than done. For instance, the “Schedule a callback for another time” feature invariably returns with the message “No immediate callback available. Try again later.” I thought maybe the more-secure settings in Safari were causing a problem, so I tried again with Firefox. Same result.
Finally I connected by chat with a nice guy who was not empowered to execute the obvious, simple, and immediate solution to the problem. We had to do it the hard way.
Somewhere during my latest futile rummaging around on the site (“Click here for instructions”, then the instructions saying to go right back where you were, and so forth), a window popped up asking if I wanted to answer some questions about my experience.
You’re damn skippy I wanted to answer some questions. When my latest exercise in circular navigation was complete, the survey came up. “Neutral third party,” I was assured. “No specific identity info recorded.” I took the survey, being sure to give credit in the few places it was due. I answered the essay questions with specifics. In the end, I clicked ‘submit’.
“System not working at this time,” the message said.
