Resumption of the war with computers

Up to this point I’ve more than less accepted responsibility for my computer challenges. It’s a combination of my own quirks and being a product of another age. But, no more. I’ve been too conciliatory about this. It’s time to come out and state the unassailable truth. And that would be that the people who create hardware and software possess the communication skills of a block of quartz. I hope I’m not being ambiguous about my position. I recently had to change computers. I put it off as long as possible, but the hard drive was sending signals that it was about to put itself into a hospice. I could’ve performed an organ transplant, updating a few other components in the process, but the effort would be on a par with migrating to a new one. And, you still wind up with a box that’s a few years, which is to say, prehistoric in the IT world. Selecting and setting up the new system was one of the more traumatic episodes of my life. I’d rather sandpaper a rabid panther’s anus in a phone booth, but wasn’t granted the choice. I won’t impose upon you with the protracted saga of sorrows, but will select one minuscule sliver that exemplifies the whole. I had saved most of my program disks in a more or less (mostly less) organized fashion. But, moving to Windows 8 nullified some of them, in spite of assurances from the publishers to the contrary. Some offered solutions that “incomprehensible” wouldn’t begin to describe. If I was capable of understanding these technical gyrations, much less performing them, I would’ve built my own equipment and written the software. In this isolated case I’m using to embody the overall experience, I gave up and bought a new program. The gaudy box promised not only the original content (scant, if the truth be told, which they chose not to do), but that I could obtain a thousand times that as a bonus by visiting their web site, free of charge. Do people still believe anything is free? This is obviously a ploy to coerce my personal data for future promotion. So, I loaded the software, in spite of the fact that the process barely resembled the instructions, which appeared to apply to some previous version. Along the way, I was presented with numerous decisions in a language that resembled English only in the characters it employed. Most choices were made with the flip of a quarter. With a little trial and error, and the better part of an hour, it seemed to be functioning. The program included a video “tutorial” which essentially said that they really couldn’t explain anything in ten minutes and I’d have to go to the voluminous manual on their site to accomplish much beyond opening the program. Of course, I’d have to register (provide personal information) to access that. Having attained “liftoff,” it was time to collect the freebie. I clicked the button on the screen and was whisked to the site. As anticipated, it required the surrendering of my name and other particulars. Having defeated me on that account, they graciously flashed the screen with the promised bonus content. But, it showed only a “buy now” button. I backed up and repeated the approach several times to ascertain if I had missed a fork in the road. Not so. I crept into the purchase process to see if a free option emerged. The only possibility I could detect was the box for a coupon code. I turned the software carton inside out but could locate no coupon. So, I clicked the customer service tab. As is usually the case, they tried to deflect me to a FAQ solution, which I wrestled with for a while. Finding no joy there, I drilled down until they relented with a contact page. They are always reluctant to allow you to communicate with the man behind the curtain. I filled in the blanks and clicked send. The button faded but nothing else happened until the page timed out. I repeated the process several times with the same result. I searched the web for a solution. I didn’t find one but did locate a forum of rants which contained a customer service email address. I used that and, miracle of miracles, received the automated response that I would get a real response in the near future. Wonders haven’t ceased. The next day, I got an email that directed me to one of several incomprehensible lines in the set-up instructions. It had no description or label, so how would anyone know it was a coupon code? I returned to the purchase process and inserted the code. The page liked it and gave me the go ahead to download, which I did. It showed one of those progress meters but didn’t divulge where it was downloading to. No additional content showed up in my computer’s files. It’s a new computer so it isn’t like it could be a needle in a haystack. Back to the customer service email. The response was that at the bottom of the download page, which you would have to scroll down to see and who does that, there is a line that tells you what file it’s going to (which is buried deep within the purchased program) and gives you the option of it then automatically loading into the software I had purchased. I found the line, in a font readable only with an electron microscope. Having not seen it, I hadn’t checked the box that would’ve executed the next step of adding it to the program menu. Back to my new friend in customer service. He instructed me to unzip it, saving it to a file within the program, specifying the exact name of that file. After some gyrations with Windows 8, it finally coughed up the documents page and I could find no such folder. But, there was a similar one that contained the other initially provided content, so I unzipped and downloaded to it. Fine, but it still didn’t show up on the program menu. I hated to bother my new friend in customer service, but had no choice. He said I had to find the “add” button in the program and specify that file. I did and added that file. Or, thought I did. It did not appear in the menu. I repeated a couple times with no success. More correspondence with customer service. It would’ve been helpful if he had passed along all the steps up front. I could almost hear the sigh in his email. He said it would be called ______ in the menu, a name different from the file. And how is anyone supposed to connect those dots? So, problem solved. But wait, as they say on TV ads, don’t respond yet. There’s more. The package had contained a second disk with more bonus content. I loaded that and an additional program icon appeared on my desktop. Huh? It had loaded the free trial version of the program, not additional content as the disk was labeled. Just what I needed, a duplicate to eat up drive space. Well, not a duplicate since the trial version was so prosaic as to almost have no function. Loading just one program consumed the equivalent of a lip-biting workday. You can extrapolate to imagine the entire process. Now, all that remains is mastering Windows 8. If that works out, I’ll shoot for creating peace in the Middle East.