A Special Level Of Hell

There truly should be a special level of Hell reserved for software executives who make major upgrades to perfectly functional software with zero warning.

I’m looking at you, Adobe Acrobat.

A program that I use dozens and dozens and dozens of times a day. If I’m churning out reports, easily 100+ files a day. I’ve used it for years, it’s all muscle memory for 99% of what I do, and for that other 1% I’ve got a pretty good grip on how Acrobat is organized so it doesn’t take long to figure out where to go to get something new done.

Until it’s…not.

Until I get a bunch of windows telling me how *new* and *wonderful* and *user friendly* the new version is and how it will make my work so much faster!

Maybe. Maybe once I put a few hundred hours into using it. Maybe once I sit down with some tutorials or “play” with it to first learn how to do the same tasks I already need to do a thousand times a day, then figure out what the *new* and *wonderful* version has that will let me do things so much more efficiently. Design my own menus? Great! (Later!) Set up custom commands and macros? Fantastic! (Later!) Design my own pages! Amazing! (Later!)

Right this second? I need to get my work done and I’m already under enough time pressure so I could swallow a lump of coal and shit out a diamond. So when tasks that normally take 3-4 minute now take 8-10 (or more) minutes, I’m not happy. When I have to stop and think and hunt and learn with almost every keystroke to do even the most fundamental tasks all freakin’ day long, I’m less than impressed.

The one and only saving grace, and thank god I glimpsed something about it and I remembered seeing it so I had a chance of hunting for it and finding where it was hidden, was a command something like “Turn off new version.” Hit that, pray for the best, and suddenly my fingers don’t feel broken and useless and misguided anymore.

So today went better, at least on that front. And then when I was working through something this evening my screen was hijacked and Adobe wanted to know if pretty please, wouldn’t I like to take a short survey to tell them *WHY* I was foolish and blind enough to roll back their interface, why I was so much of a Luddite that I would abandon the spectacular, new, and wonderful benefits of the new version? This was critical! They needed to know!

Boy, did I tell them!

They had limits on how much text I could put into the response boxes, so they didn’t get ALL of the comments above. Just the highlights. Maybe a little more swearing.

Do I want to leave them my phone number and email address so they can contact me if they have any follow up questions? Sure.

I’m praying they have follow up questions!