Victoire!!!

I didn't think it was possible, but I believe that we actually resolved all of my Quicken upgrade tech glitch issues.  This might not sound like much of a reason for glorious celebration to you, but believe me, if you had seen all the numbing problems we had to deal with (and "we" included the great tech support guy, Kelvin), and the number of times Kelvin said, "Hmmph, I've never seen that before," you'd be overjoyed and stunned, well.  Round Two started early this morning, when he called from South Carolina at 7:15 AM -- not to worry, it was pre-arranged, so I was expected it -- and it took another 2-1/2 hours until we fixed it.

That makes it eight hours of phone tech supports the last two days, and this doesn't count the two hours I took trying to track down the problem in the first place, before waving the white flag and calling tech support.

(You can read Part One of the story by clicking here.  Or just scrolling down to the previous tale...)

This was really a total tsunami.  And it wasn’t anything I did wrong when upgrading – at one point, for instance, Kelvin uninstalled all versions, did an additional clean-up of them, downloaded a new version directly from Quicken, and re-converted fresh, clean data files I had happily backed up on Saturday.  [NOTE:  Always back up!!]  And yet with all that, it still was horribly screwed up.  In fact, he couldn’t log in with his own name and password. 
 
I won't even begin to describe the bizarre, horrific mess.  Tons of huge problems I didn’t think would ever get resolved.  The big one this morning we dealt with was that that my checkbook didn’t carry over the running balance for most items, so they were blank, and my ending checkbook balance was several trillion dollars.  (I could only wish…)  We finally tracked down several hundred anomalies, which we "zero’ed out," figuring I’d have to reconcile the account later.  (Once again, as with yesterday, “Hmmph, I’ve never seen that before,” he said.  And so I explained to him the Why Me, Lord Syndrome.)  I had one hope – because these anomalies didn’t make the slightest sense, I had the feeling that they all get entered into my checking account by mistake and were, in fact, zero entries.  After we deleted the very last one, I then checked the balance…and it was right to the penny!  O freaking joy!!!

But here's one example of something which was a huge problem but could have been resolved easily with a better design – it picked up “Bill Reminders” from 2003, which sounds okay, except that (get this...) it actually carried them ALL over from the intervening 13 years!  And there was no way to turn it off.  You could turn ON Bill Reminders with one click, but you couldn’t turn them OFF.  You had to delete each one manually.  And there were 1,500 of them!!  (There’d have been more, but that’s the limit Quicken will save.)  Never mind that the dollar amounts it was reminding me of were bizarre, like in the tens of billions of dollars each!  Really.  And because there were 1,500 reminders, it used up SO much memory that it kept freezing up the program for 15-20 seconds after each deletion.  We did it one…by…one.  At the end, I offered a suggestion – “In the next version of Quicken, how about if they add an option to turn off Bill Reminders with one click…”  He agreed that that would be a good one.  After 20+ years of Quicken, I'm boggled that this was never something they did,
 
Believe me, this didn’t touch even touch the surface of the problems, which I really thought could be unfixable.  And which was mind-numbingly disconcerting when I though all my finances were screwed up at best or lost at worst.  But Kelvin really was wonderful, and after eight hours got it all resolved.  By the end, we – honestly – had developed a great rapport, and he said he was sending me his email and work phone, if I had any problems in the future.  (I think also he appreciated that I never screamed at him and told good stories.  And that I'd actually worked on a movie in Columbia, where he lives. Staying Together with Sean Astin, Dermot Mulroney, Daphne Zuniga and others, directed by the actress Lee Grant. Plus, we had so much time that we got into discussion the upcoming South Carolina primary.  They're already being bombarded by TV ads, he says.).
 
So, Kelvin was great.  And the program now will hopefully run just fine.  I've always good a fine experience with Quicken.  But WHAT A DISASTER getting there.  I'm absolutely certain that this isn't even close to typical, and that usually it goes smoothly.  But a very-techie, knowledgeable about such things friend said to me that Intuit/Quicken has a reputation for sloppy software.  As I said, my experiences before today have been good.  And the company clearly has a huge user base, so people tend to like the products.  But...this was just horrible.

​But it got resolved.  Thanks to Kelvin.  I've written already to his supervisor.  He was a gem.
 
The only thing I'm still really upset about is that that whole several "trillion dollars" in my checking account wasa glitch, too, and didn't pan out.