Waiting for Christmas …
Shakespeare tourists must have unusual taste, or perhaps some midsummer night’s dream overwhelms their normal sensibilities. Why else would there be a store selling Christmas decorations in July opposite the bard’s birthplace? And so the man sits and waits for Christmas, or maybe for his wife to return from the cottage tour that he preferred to skip.
And I sit and wait for Christmas in Austin. It came last week in the form of my new iMac but, like getting a radio controlled car without batteries under the tree, I have been forced to twiddle the knobs without seeing it really run. The Adobe process for converting a Photoshop for Windows license to Photoshop for Mac appears to have been conceived in the 1970’s and left unchanged since then. Three days were lost to the fact that you must speak to a salesperson and they, understandably, do not work nights and weekends. You pay your upgrade fee to the sales person (if you are not already on the current version) and listen carefully to the verbal instructions that follow: your support case number, your order number and how to Google for the fabled “Letter of Destruction.” You wonder where the part that could not have been done online will reveal itself as you cast around for a pen to write down the numbers. You do the Googling, download the “Letter of Destruction,” sign it, scan it and upload it to Adobe’s support site … and wait a little.
Exciting news, the signed promise to delete all prior copies is seen and approved within a few hours so now they can ship your copy of Photoshop CS4 for the Mac. Except it doesn’t ship, it stays in “pending” purgatory. Thursday evening brings a FedEx tracking number … but FedEx does not have the package. Not until Saturday does the blue box finally start its journey to Texas; estimated delivery Tuesday. Christmas will arrive on Tuesday, 10 days after Christmas Eve.
And so I call my reluctant PC out of retirement to process one more image after all. An image of a guy in a polo shirt, waiting for Christmas.
