Here in our little corner of the Northwest there’s a flu going around. I don’t want it. Today I have taken it a little bit easy because I feel run down and like my immune system may be busily trying to fight something off. So I decided that today, a two-hour lunch was in order. In this case, "lunch" is basically a euphemism for lying on the daybed reading/dozing in the sun. Anyway, returning to my computer didn’t seem as bad after that, so maybe I’ll dodge the evil germ yet.
In other news, during my moment in the sun, the UPS man dropped off my new updated copy of Norton System Works. This upgrade has been, for lack of a better word: stupid. First off, Norton reminds you months in advance that your anti-virus subscription will expire. So you put it off for a while. But it doesn’t have that one little line of programming code that should tell you on the DAY it expires that your opportunities are over. No, instead, a few days later, I discover that somehow it’s all expired and my system is now screamingly unprotected. (Eeek!)
By this point, I’m now a lot more motivated to click the button and go to buy my update. After 12 or 15 confusing screens detailing every possible Symantec product, I finally figure out which one is mine and buy the upgrade. Except that at the end of the transaction, pressing the Submit button didn’t actually submit my order. It crashed my browser instead. This type of thing is just bad because you are sitting there wondering…"okay, did the order go through or not?" (I didn’t want to try again, since no one wants TWO copies of the update.)
So I called tech support. As I’ve noted in the past, I hate calling tech support. And it lived up to my low expectations. In fact, it was the classic bad tech support experience. The call was obviously routed to someone in some far, far away country who didn’t speak English very well. After I laboriously explained how their shopping cart ate my order, I finally determined that the charge did not, in fact, go through.
Since I do seem to only have one copy of my upgrade, we like to think Symantec was right. Only time – and my credit card statement – will tell the true story.