Adobe Creative Cloud Licensing… For Dummies
There’s nothing like an ever-so-slightly complicated licensing model to bring a whole office to its knees.
“Aaaaaaaaandrewwwww. What’s my passsswoorrrd?”
Said the 29-year-old grown-fucking-man web designer.
Kelly in development just found herself logged out of the Adobe account we set up for her and her first reaction was to STEAL the account that’s meant for Jon, the web designer.
Normally this would be fine because you can happily use these accounts on up to two computers…
Obviously though, Jon thought it would be a great idea to share his account with Alex in finance last week so she could make that meme of Pintgate, and now Jon has been booted out and — WHATISSSIT Jon?! — he’s whining in my ear ?.
Despite not having any interest in doing anything remotely creative at work, or even trying to understand what InDesign is, it’s still me that logs into our company’s Adobe Creative Cloud account more frequently than anyone else.
It’s my own fault really, for getting to the point where our company needed more than one license. I mean, our species has flown to the moon but it’s not a patch on multiplying the world’s most convoluted method of licensing software by two.
It’s not even that you need a 2:1 in cryptography to get in; I got that t-shirt long ago. It’s that the whole system plain doesn’t work…
Adobe’s login page (when I finally find the right one) bugs out on me. And then you get into insane situations where your old old password doesn’t meet the current policy, so the front end validation goes all ❌ egh-uhh ❌ on you EVEN THOUGH THAT IS THE DAMN PASSWORD.
I can just about deal with all of this when it’s fundamentally in somebody’s job description to be creative, or to be a cloud, or to generally look stylish and productive on an iMac.
But when somebody lets marketing people loose on this shit for no good reason other than they feel the need to try and sex up some horseshit they’re trying to flog by snapgramming their twittwat…
“Hey! Andzo! What’s say ya give me the password for the old Adobe Wang-gwam? We really need to get down on the newsfeeds and make those filters work-it for us brah.” *
… You get the point. I lose the will.
To be fair, if anyone deserves to go viral, it probably is Piers in marketing. Aside from the fact that I’d be very surprised if he didn’t have V.D, he’s also the most famous pier in the office. He’s more famous than Brighton Pier, Blackpool Pier, that one that burned down… erm… Weston-super-Mare.
Anyway, the nub is, being tangentially responsible for Adobe licensing is just like having kids…
When the kids are like: “Daddy, Daddy can we drive the car” — wonderful parent that I one day will be — I shall simply hiss, “yes yes, just don’t wipe your sister’s brains all over the driveway”, and then let them make their own mistakes.
I quietly reset the password, return to my game of Minesweeper or whatever else is infinitely more interesting that day, and wait for the havoc to cause itself again in three weeks.