Just had an intensely frustrating experience trying to activate a copy of Microsoft Office OneNote. I have been through quite a number of laptops one way or another over the last few months, and thus have reached the maximum number of activations I’m permitted (five). So now, whenever I install this program on a new laptop (as I’ve had to several times on my new MacBook) I am forced to call into the helpdesk (which appears to be in India) and get them to activate it for me.

This involves entering or saying a 54-digit string of numbers before I can even speak to a human being, and then having to repeat some of those numbers to the human being, before they give me a 42-digit string of numbers which I have to type in in order to activate my product.

This latest time I am forced to reactivate because I activated OneNote within the Fusion environment and am now trying to use the same instance of OneNote from within the BootCamp environment. This apparently triggered a “hardware change” which necessitates reactivation (I’m guessing this provision is designed to prevent people copying an installation of the software from one computer to another, which of course I haven’t done - this is actually the very same installation on the same spot on my hard drive).

So I called Microsoft for the third time in a week to activate my product. I find that typing the numbers in is quicker than speaking them, but unfortunately I went too quickly for the system and so it put my through to a human being. He then needed me to speak them to him, but had so much background noise in the call center that he was unable to hear me, so it took ages.

Once we finally completed the process, he asked me what product I was trying to activate. When I told him he told me that their servers (running Windows, no doubt) for activating Office products were down, and would I please call back in half an hour. Unbelievable. Good old Microsoft - a joy to work with from start to finish.