Halfway Through August and Everything's a Mess

The summer drones on and stores start stocking back to school supplies. Nights are cooler and mornings often require a light cardigan. 

About time. 

In my personal/art life, unfortunately, sailing is still over choppy waters. 

The tendinitis in my hand is almost almost better, thank holy geeze (and if you suffer from the same and/or want to avoid RSIs, check out this great video with simple stretches and a non-native English speaker saying 'physicist' when I'm relatively sure he meant 'physician') and my left-hand control improves daily. 

So I have a new catastrophe to keep me from working. 

The entire Creative Suite on my laptop has stopped working. 

It crashes as soon as I open it. 

So far, I've spoke to Adobe (and been jerked around by Adobe), done two uninstall/reinstalls--one with a through, by-hand cleaning of the registry, and visited my local Lenovo support center (where I was also jerked around).  

My next step is turning my laptop over to a tech-savy friend in hopes he can figure out what the problems is.  Possible culprits at this point range from a virus to a video card problem to a failing hard drive.  

Now, I just want to take a moment to talk about the customer service I have received.

 When I spoke to the the customer support people I did, I spent the time I wasn't just feeling stressed and tearful feeling stupid, due to my general lack of computer knowledge -- which is higher than that of the average Jill off the street, but still leaves me far from tech savvy.  When, after explaining my situation as clearly and with as many pertinent details as I could and then being told I couldn't be helped, I found myself feeling impotently upset but resigned to accept the judgement under the umbrella of 'that's policy'.  I was told repeatedly that I could go check forums if I wanted, and if I had a tech savy friend, that might be my best bet. This seemed really stressful and unsatisfying but I couldn't figure out exactly why. 

Then a friend pinpointed for me the heart of my discontent.  

I KNOW I am not tech savvy enough to handle these problems on my own.  This is why I do things like get extended warranties and so forth on my very expensive hardware and software.  Because I DON'T know how to fix things myself.  I don't even know where to start.  Forums are great, but they generally seem aimed at people more knowledgeable than me, who understand the guts of their computers.  Who are comfortable going into registry editors and dealing with command line tinkering.  I am not.  It would be great if I was, but I know that's just not an area I know what I'm doing.  

So, I have expensive products with protection purchased specifically in order to protect me if everything goes haywire. 

Then, when everything went haywire and I attempted to get help from the companies that should have been fixing me dinner and massaging my feet while fixing my computer, considering what I paid for the tech, I was basically told to sort it out myself.  

I. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. 

Luckily, I have computer geek friends.  But if I didn't, I don't know what I'd do. 

If my friend CAN'T find the source of the problem, I don't know what I'll do.  

So, why do I even pay for extra protection? 

I don't really have a wrap-up here or any kind of resolution.  I just know that I'm incredibly unhappy with the whole darn situation.  

*Edit 11/29/12* 

Just reading over this and laughing at that place where I wrote that my tendinitis was almost better. 

Oh, if only I knew. 

I probably would have stabbed myself in the face.