Ah, Macromedia. Creators and/or distributors of such impressive products as Dreamweaver, Flash, Director, FreeHand, ColdFusion, and more. A large, on-the-ball company. Or so one would assume.

Many years ago, I purchased Altsys Fontographer, a fairly professional font program. I was quite happy with it. But when I learned that version 4.1 would create Windows and Macintosh fonts natively, I decided it was time to upgrade. So I contacted Macromedia (current owners of Fontographer), learned they had an excellent upgrade price, and I bought the upgrade.

And it was okay, except for a few problems. Like an inability to properly generate bold and bold-italic fonts. Not to worry, though — there's a free update available to registered users! Mac users can download their most recent version, but for some reason, Windows users have to email tech support with a snailmail address. Annoying, but still — at least I can get a free upgrade.

Except the online registration process doesn't accept Fontographer serial numbers, since they're in a different format from the rest of Macromedia's products, and the online form only accepts that other format. No problem! Just use the online problem report form to tell them that I can't register.

No problem? No reply!

Eventually, I call tech support. They register my serial number. I ask if I can get the update through them, but they say I have to send email to the tech support department.

No problem. Again, no reply.

So I call back after a suitably long time has passed. The support rep I speak to tells me to email my address directly to her, and she'll get it to the appropriate people. She sends an email back saying she'll update me on Monday.

Monday passes, and no email. Another Monday; no email. Another Monday; I send her an email asking what's up.

According to her, the person in charge of sending out the updates is "in transition" — but she'll see if she can get someone to send it out. (What, is only one person at Macromedia authorized to put postage and an address on a box and drop it in the mail?)

A couple of days later, she tells me that one of the engineers has found a disk image of the updater, and he'll put it on floppies for me and drop it in the mail. (Floppies — how quaint!)

Five days later, a cardboard envelope arrives. The return address — a piece of paper taped to the envelope — indicates that it came from Macronedia. Inside are three hand-labeled floppies. It has been two months since my initial request for the updater.

I install it. No problem! Well, one problem; while Fontographer ran fine on my Pentium 4 system with 1GB of memory, it claims there's not enough memory on my my Athlon-XP based system (also with 1GB memory). According to the technote on their site, too much memory confuses Fontographer — but it had no problems with the same amount of memory on a different processor.

I solve the problem by writing a small utility that lets me reboot Windows into different pagefile configurations. I run Fontographer. Aha! It works — but now it wants a serial number. According to the readme.txt file on the first diskette, this serial number is printed on the back of the diskette. No such number exists on any of the hand-labeled diskettes. My original serial number won't work; it expects the new Macromedia serial number format, the one that would actually work in their online registration form.

Another email to Macromedia. They're on the West coast, I believe, so I shouldn't hear back from them until at least... Thursday.