Chatting With India

A friend was not able to install his 80 y.o. wife's Photoshop on her new computer because, although she owned PS 5.5, and CS upgrade, he had lost the registration code for 5.5

Based on my own experience with a similar problem (involving Adobe Acrobat), I gave him the following advice. It generalizes beyond Adobe. It is actually not a bad way to get problems like this solved in this day and age.

1. Find an activity you really want to do that you can do at your desk, or on your computer, that does not take a large percentage of your IQ or your uninterrupted attention. Start that activity. Expect to spend hours at it.

2. Write a clear little paragraph describing your problem: It should be 4 or 5 sentences, and refer to your wife's age and her inability to master a new interface. No one will ever read this paragraph, but you will use it to pick out portions in response to what you are told.

3. Fire up a chat with someone in support at adobe.com.  The person will be India. For your explanation of what's wrong, paste the thing you typed. It is too long, and they will not read it. But anything shorter will convince them unshakably that you have some problem other than the one you have.

4. Now you must be very patient in two senses. One, it will take a long time, both because the answers will take a few minutes turnaround each, and because you will go down many little wormholes with the nice Indian person. Two, you will have periods of insanity that will test your patience. You will say "Mary has a healthy little lamb" six times, and out of the blue he will ask you what symptoms make you believe Maria's cow is sick. The person will constantly say insane things that will make you think he or she has no clue of what you're been talking about. No matter, just be persistent with your explanations. It's worth it, as long as you don't sit there twiddling your thumbs. Thus the activity you are doing in parallel.

5. Periodically, pick the text of your chat and paste it into a text editor. That way it is easier to go back and pick out things you need to say again, and paste them into the chat, without having to retype. You will constantly need to retell them things you've already said several times.

6. At various points, he will try to sell you on modern software. Just persistently pick where you said it isn't possible, and why.

7. Chances are good that he will eventually give you a registration code that will work.

8. Use this moment to gather all your registration numbers in some central file that you will remember exists, so you don't have to do this exact thing again.