The Rosetta Stone Nightmare

Yesterday and today have been fibromyalgia days, so I have scaled back my activity. It seemed like a great time to fire up my Rosetta Stone course in Italian, which has an online option so you can speak with other students, play games, and also talk to native speakers.

How can I possibly explain the almost insurmountable glitches trying to register for the course and have access to the online options? I have spent literally HOURS during the past few days as a bunch of very patient, very kind people in India have worked through every problem that comes up. And let me tell you, the problems have been at every single step of the way.

First, I couldn't activate my course. The activation code is a string of numbers so long that if I lay the series down on the sidewalk, I'd have to run a 5K just to read them all. When some poor bloke in India finally got that straightened out on the chat support service, it turned out that my course was activated, but I could not access the online options.

Why could I not activate the online options? Well, among all the other things, I had two IDs for the course. This morning, working on the initial part of the problem, again with some poor soul in India, our chat was cut off in mid-solution. Natch, when I tried to get this person back, he was busy with someone else, so I began again with another long-suffering computer nerd who must have thought I was severely challenged, intellectually speaking. Okay, we discovered that my computer was a day ahead of the date, and thus my requests to get online with others involved a time warp the system couldn't handle. We got that fixed. (No, I had never noticed my computer was a day ahead of the date because I never look at the date.)

Now another in what seems to be an endless stream of glitches and malfunctions has taken place: a nice little webpage asks me to tell them something about myself in order to "enhance my learning experience". What I've learned, however, is that the webpage can't save my data, so this is as far as I've gotten now that I'm online. I'm almost afraid to contact those folks in India on the chat support, for fear of getting someone I've already spoken to. I can see people fleeing their computers at the very mention of my name.

All this is subsequent, of course, to other more manageable issues such as installing a headset with integrated microphone so the language program can correct my pronunciation. The reason these issues are manageable is because I didn't manage them--my reliable computer nerd did it for me. He's a nice fellow who insists on showing me what he is doing on the benighted assumption it is going to sink in, so I hate to disappoint him. I nod sagely, every now and then inserting an enlightened "Ah, now I see!" or "Yes, of course", just to prevent him from launching into an even more bone-headed explanation on the outside chance of lowering his standards of teaching to reach even me.

My bravery falters at the prospect of going back to the online chat support, but there is nothing for it. My husband is coming home for lunch early today, so I am going to relax in the kitchen before tackling the next Rosetta Stone problem. Fortunately, I can now tell you che io sono una donna, which does not mean that I'm a donut. I can identify articles of clothing, activities, and conjugate a verb or two. The rest of the course is marvelous, but I refuse to give up on the chance to play games in Italian or talk to others as confused by the online options as I am--assuming there are actually others out there who have managed to get online. Stay tuned.