I always knew I was unique

Evidently I just didn't know how unique I was. Like in the land of accounting software unique.

As a CPA, I have to buy accounting software that's a step above your garden variety Quickbooks or Peachtree. This is to put out professional looking reporting to convince people who are giving fairly sizeable amounts of money to me that I know what I'm doing. After all, you don't want to see the guy fixing your car driving around in an old beat-up bomb, do you? Same principle -- you have to provide professional looking reports for your clients.

The package I use is one of the leaders in the industry. And it ain't cheap either.

So imagine my distress this year when I downloaded the update to the software to be able to print W2s and 1099s and discovered that the sucker wouldn't run on my computer. Runs fine on everybody else's. And they had no clue why. Exhausted all the possibilities they had. Furthermore, **Richard**, Alpha Geek of all Geeks, also couldn't find out why.

At this point, there was only one solution: buy a new computer.

Now, mind you, I had pulled out an ancient XP machine to limp along on until I could get the new machine. Software downloaded and updated just fine on there. But it was sslloooowwwww..... and I just didn't think I could handle it. So off to Office Depot I went, where I procured a shiny new Gateway, 3GB of RAM, dual core Intel processor, 250 GB hard drive. That baby should scream! Yeah, it has Vista on it... but all my vendors now say they can handle Vista, right??

Yeah... well...

Downloaded the software last night. Now, you can download the program off the internet, but any licensing or updating has to be done through a special "connect" function that is internal to the program. So you can't just go fetch a file off the internet and update (which I find completely ludicrous, but I also find the fact that they want you to have a wired network connection to talk to them ludicrous as well -- and notice in all of this that I'm carefully not revealing the name of the guilty party either).

THE FREAKIN CONNECTION WON'T WORK THROUGH VISTA.

And evidently I'm the first person to find this out.

Oh, Joy. Oh, Rapture. Oh serious one way flow of conversation through the phone to the rep on the other end.

At first they tried to blame it on my DSL connection. I informed them that didn't fly since it worked just fine on the aforementioned sssllllooooowwww XP machine. "Hmmmph" was the reply I got. I also told them I found it curious that **everything else** worked on the internet except for stuff internal to *Their* program, so it seemed pretty obvious to me where the problem was.

After about two hours of conferring with their techno geeks, they decide that I should snarf some files off the ssslllloooowwww XP machine and restore them to the shiny new Vista machine to get me going for now. It still doesn't fix the problem, but at least I can function. They say they want to re-visit it after tax season. I say we're going to re-visit it in March when my renewal comes up and they want $$$.

Am I the only person who thinks it's unreasonable to expect that this stuff get, say, *tested* if you're gonna claim your stuff works with the operating system???

And for you FSU fans, the new machine is "Garnet Red". Says so on the box. It was the only color they had. I'm sticking with the FSU take on it to avoid any Bulldog associations.