Fix one thing, ya bust something else

Yesterday the baleboosteh emailed me from the Land of Færie and said “Help!  When I try to open QuickBooks it gives me an error about license properties and closes again.”  I added it to my list of Things Still to Fix, along with Install the HP Printer Drivers on the POS Terminal and Reinstall Outlook for the Remaining Mail Account.  This morning went in to see about them.

The data, so far as I can tell, is fine—we just can’t get to it.  I searched Intuit’s Web site for the error code and quickly found the page for “Could not initialize license properties.  Error 3371:  QuickBooks could not load the license data.  This may be caused by missing or damaged files.”  The cause?  “This error may be caused by removing a Norton® Product with the Norton® Removal Utility damaging the QuickBooks installation.”  Well now, isn’t that special . . . uninstalling anything Norton kills QuickBooks because uninstalling anything Norton screws up the Microsoft .NET framework.  (Which decided me:  when we life-cycle the computers later this year, I am GOING to find a different AV solution.  I’ve had enough of Symantec’s craptacular implementations.)

I followed the mercifully clear instructions from the Intuit support page on how to fix the problem, but when I got to the second part, where I’m supposed to run msiexec to invoke the QuickBooks installer, Quickbooks told me “please insert the installation CD.”  Waitaminnit . . . I thought I had already done that, and popped out the tray to check.  I had, but it appears that the Reinstallation CD (what I actually had) and the Installation CD are two different animals.  I guessed the problem was that when we bought QuickBooks 2006, we got a download version rather than the full retail version and the CD we have is only good for some other kind of installing.  This means I have to talk to Intuit support and find out What Now.

Note to business owners:  Intuit expects that no one will ever have problems with business software on the weekend, because their support and sales lines are only open from six to six Pacific on weekdays.  Only if you buy an annual support plan do you get access to a 24-7 support team.  And guess what?  Because the sales office is closed, you can’t buy a support plan on the weekend; no one is there to take the order.    Even buying a support plan online won’t work; it needs a human to process the order . . . and the humans went home on Friday afternoon.  You’re out of luck until at least Monday, and very possibly until Tuesday because they can’t get their shit together to process weekend orders before then unless you hound them, which is just what I plan to do Monday afternoon after I get away from the Empire.  I think Intuit has learned altogether too well that if you’re the only game in town *cough*Windows*cough* you can get away with all kinds of high-handed business practices.  If I tried to run a support queue the way they do, I’d be out the door.

Fortunately, the baleboosteh made the conscious decision not to flip out about this, which is good, and if we were going to have problems, August is a good time for it.  Business is slow in summer.  It’d be slower than this were it not for Utilikilt sales.  Our second shipment of fifty is supposed to arrive Tuesday, and not a minute too soon.  We have less than half a dozen left of the first order we got in July.  Because we advertise having them in stock, instead of customers having to wait up to eight weeks for the company—which still runs its production on a cottage-industry model—to make a singleton by special order, we’ve had orders placed with us from as far away as Norway!  Utilikilt’s management could learn a lot from the Empire’s supply chain and production models, if only they’d get their macrobiotic heads out of their skinny little vegetarian asses and do a few things like finding a plant that can handle good-quality, industrial-quantity production.  Oh, yeah—that’s another thing.  They’re telling us they refuse to make us kilts in anything bigger than a 44-inch waist size.  Appears they can’t grasp the idea that Texans, particularly Texans who are old enough to have the money to drop $175 to $250 on the spot for a kilt, tend to come in Large Economy Sizes.  So far the baleboosteh has failed to hammer that into their heads; she’s now looking round for a bigger hammer.  I suggested that if Utilikilt can’t get their shit together any better than that, we’d do well to cut a second wholesale deal with some of the competition, Sport Kilt or someone, to take up the slack.  The demand is out there, and there’s lots of it, but these guys are still thinking small, to their own detriment.

Fourteen slates repaint the styrofoam girder.  Fnord.