I am bloody cross with Adobe customer service and seriously unimpressed with BTFon.
BTFon wireless hotspots
I wouldn’t have been trying to use BTFon if my landline and laptop were talking to each other (my fault that they’re not) or if my O2 wireless broadband USB device was working. It worked okay in my father’s house near Chester, albeit with an inferior signal to my O2 phone. But half way up this particular mountain where my O2 mobile happily sits at four out of five signal bars, my O2 dongle says happily “signal very low”. For “very low” read “unusable”. OK. Strike two. No dial up, no wireless dongle.
But there’s a third option – BTFon. The village has a BTFon “Hotspot”. The BTFon website is perky and cheerful, all teenage colours and helpful little FAQs. No contact details, mind you, but lots of FAQs. BTFon produces a signal so I sign up to 5 days for 15UKP. The site takes my payment, tells me that I am a member but still an “alien” (in other words I haven’t personalized my profile) and I’m ready to go. All I need to do is log onto my Gmail account and click the confirmation URL for my account to be activated.
So I type the Gmail URL. Immediately my browser comes up with a BT Openzone message informing me that if I want to use the local wireless point I need to register. I go back to BTFon which has a happy message telling me that my access to the web won’t work until I have accessed the web and replied to the confirmation email. So let me get this straight. In order to gain access to the web I need to log onto the web and read my webmail. But I can’t log onto the web because I haven’t replied to the confirmation email. Errrr what? That’s when I found out that there are no contact details on the BTFon site. I try various different ways of trying to get around the problem and eventually BTFon gives me a message to say that if I click a certain link all my problems with be fixed. I click. Another link appears: “Fix This”. I click. I go through the procedure four times, and four times it returns me to the error message, each time waiting for page loads which were several minutes in duration. Eventually (around an hour and a half after my first encounter with the BTFon home page) it lets me log onto Google and I can then respond to the confirmation message. Hurrah! I have between two and three bars, more than enough to use the web. I spend another hour doing what I need to do and then I go to bed. By now it is 3am.
In the morning I wake up and write some notes on a paper that I’m researching. At around 11am I decide to log on to my email. I manage to log onto the BTFon website without difficulty, enter my username and password and am told that I am ready to surf. Ta everso. But can I surf? Can I heck. I can work my way around the perky little BTFon website all I like but I cannot get onto any other site. I give up. I try again at 1am and it works perfectly.
And that’s the pattern. I managed to log on twice one afternoon, and it was dreadfully slow, but apart from that I could only log on after midnight. If you consider BTFon as a wireless connection solution be warned! It’s not all sweetness and roses.
Next stop Adobe.
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.
