Some may know that being a teacher here in Western Australia means that I get an education department supplied laptop, fully insured and warrantied on lease. That's one perk. Another is that the education department also supplies me with Adobe CS6 Premium. For free!... Yeah, that's pretty good.

But the lease deal with the laptop is becoming less and less attractive financially as the model we get is fairly average and compared to something I could buy in the shop, not all that cost effective. Even with the 3 year all inclusive warranty and insurance. Another negative is that the security restrictions being imposed on the newer replacement laptops by the dept. laptop scheme now means that you can't even do patches and updates (for instance, for the anti virus or even a simple java update) unless you bring it into work, go to the the in house techie and get him to either a) do the update himself, or b) give you temporary admin privileges so you can do it yourself.... Something which would only take 5 minutes or so at home as we all know. God forbid that we should want to install some actual software... like chrome or mozilla or photoshop...!!! Yeah, no, stuff that...

So to buy my own laptop seems to be the way to go right? And I'll do that when the time comes and my current lease expires. But then I'm going to lose the CS6 that I have now... Back to the old CS2 I thought, unless I could maybe buy CS6? So I looked it up. $2098 retail!! Gah!!... Even with Adobe's education discount, it was still going to be about $700.... The wife said, no....

But then a fellow teacher at school said there's another little perk the education department offers. It's called the Work at Home scheme and it allows staff in the education department to buy software for personal use ( and the odd school stuff of course) from Microsoft and Adobe for a nominal cost... And I mean nominal. Adobe CS6 Premium for Web, which is the full package, with the extended bits, and the cloud access if you so choose, costs me.... (Brace yourself now...)

$54.95....

I can only ever purchase one copy and have to provide my education dept. credentials, ID number and so on so they can keep track of that, but c'mon.... $54.95....

It arrived in the mail today.

(Ps yes I know I could get a pirate copy easily enough but I'm an honest person here and like I said.... $54.95 for cryin' out loud! That's a $2040-odd discount! A pirate copy isn't worth the hassle..)

Cheers
Sean