Adobe support tells teacher to “get a better job”
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This quite clearly reads like a clumsy phrasing by someone who is not a native English speaker. I'd wager one of the earlier messages was along the lines of "I can't afford higher prices because of my job" or something, and it seems obvious how this then gets kind of mangled in response. That an ESOL teacher would not make this assumption is frankly baffling to me.
The world would be a much nicer place if we assumed good intentions in people we dealt with. Maybe I'm just naïve. But it kind of pisses me off that some poor support worker could quite conceivably lose their job because someone took out-of-proportion offense.
I'm used to hearing tense/mood mistakes in verbs (especially would vs. should vs. will) coming from people who have English as a second language. For example, I'm used to hearing something like "I wish you will do well on your test", which in context clearly means "good luck with your test" and not "why can't you do better on your test?"
Maybe the support person actually said something cruel. But based on my experiences with ESL speakers, it feels much easier to believe that the Adobe support person meant well but lacks a native speaker's grasp on the connotations of English verb conjugation.
I personally think that, since English is an international language, Western native English speakers (myself included) should learn to forgive a certain degree of linguistic foreignness when talking to English speakers in general. Many English speakers have a perfectly good grasp of English for professional work, including support problem solving, so they are fluent enough to be competent and polite even if they might miss social nuances in casual or personal settings.
I imagine their current arrangement is cheaper than paying highly fluent English speakers in the first place.
And I don't hold it against the support person either. Whether they learned English as a second language or are just not particularly good at it, Adobe sets up their support centers and it's there responsibility to make sure that their (Adobe) customers receive clear and appropriate communications.
I do believe in many situations it is more moral NOT to help, NOT to take that underpaying job, etc. These crappy situations are made possible by people at the top. By giving into the situations and sacrificing of yourself you are helping the poor decision makers at the top to keep making poor decisions.
At some point a failure and rebuilding could ensure no child goes without school supplies. Continuing to sacrifice of yourself so a few extra kids each year can have school supplies may mean less kids get school supplies in the long-term. In some sense teachers aren't sacrificing for the children, they are sacrificing so the shitty administrators and government policy makers can keep their jobs.
Public education isn't a capitalistic enterprise. If anything, they're letting it collapse so that they can replace it with more capitalistic alternatives like voucher programs and charter schools (which is just a way for fundamentalists to have the government pay to support their indoctrination efforts).
The only power the average worker/teacher has is their ability to say "No, I won't do that" and even then there is only power there if many are willing to stand and do that together. Sacrificing more and more so those above you can continue to say "see, it works fine. I can continue to extract as much capital out of this system as possible, because the teachers don't really need it" is a really terrible solution.
More workers need to say "NO", not bend over backwards because they are more empathetic than those at the top. The ones at the top count on that empathy and do use it against you.
Autodesk sketchbook is a good quality freemium tool to, though a bit crippled and the lowest tiers are still too much for schools.