I’m normally a pretty calm person — it takes a lot to get me riled up.  But now, I just hate Microsoft’s “Customer Service”.

I purchased my own personal Visual Studio back in 2012, since I do a little custom programming, and at now in my 60’s, just wanting to keep involved with the technology.  I’ve played a bit with Azure, and enjoyed the meager $50/month “free Azure account” that comes close to maxing out during every month… even those months that I don’t manage to even visit Azure.

The initial license was $1200, and each year since then I’ve sucked it up and paid $800 to keep the MSDN access going.  Apparently it expired (Microsoft says it expired in 2016, I say 2017), though I’ve been diligent about keeping it up to date whenever I get the renewal notices.  Then, in November 2018 I get a notice that my allowance for Azure is going away because my subscription has expired.  (At that point, I didn’t realize it had expired in 2017.  Of course, NOW I know.)

I contacted Microsoft Customer Service via Email, and was basically told that all I needed to do was re-subscribe, and everything would be okay.  So I went online in “chat” mode and arranged for the upgrade.  After receiving the Email confirming my purchase, I attempted to install the subscription key, and it complained — I’m not exactly sure what it complained about, since the little error window was too small for the error message to fully display.  The next day I tried installing it again, but the error message says that the subscription code has already been installed.  I go into my account, which tells me that my account no longer has an active subscription.  Where did my subscription go?

I open yet another ticket with Microsoft via Email, only to be “reminded” that my account was expired, and that since the subscription has been expired for longer than 30 days, “your renewal purchase can no longer be activated.”  NOW they tell me definitively that I’m screwed… but nobody had the balls to tell me that before — or they didn’t look at it close enough to tell me the truth.

I’m told “If you still want to have a subscription, I suggest to purchase a new one at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing/. ”  And then they’re kind enough to add, “Since you already purchased the renewal, you can reply to this email with confirmation to request for refund.”  Well thank you for that!

I called their 800 number, and started getting the usual overly-friendly Customer Service voice on the other end trying to explain me what happened and what my options are.  I just had to stop her and say “Look, I’m usually a pretty patient guy, but all I really want right now is for you to process my refund.”

I’m done with you, Microsoft.  I guess I’ll stick to WordPress now.