Going global with a mouthful

Yesterday my iPod froze and I had to call tech support to bring it back to life. So here I go, calling the Apple store in Salt Lake City. After going to a voice-recognition prompt that didn’t work too well, I got on the tech support queue somewhere in India. After a few minutes wait, I finally reached a rep who started by asking (in a strong Indian accent) for the serial number of my machine. I had seen this information on i-Tunes, but never on the device, so I assumed it was in the back, which it was, but in a font size that was so tiny I couldn’t read anything. I asked Evelyne to come to the rescue. After putting on her reading glasses, she could only distinguish the first character, an “8” and that was it. I then took my right contact lens off (the one I use to read with), stuck it in my mouth and tried to read while the gal who picked up the call was still waiting for the right answer. I gave her a string of characters, trying to spell intelligibly while not swallowing the lens still floating in my mouth; unfortunately, the serial number was wrong and I flunked her test. The lens still in my mouth, I lit up my halogen desk lamp and proceeded to spell the alphanumerical serial number. Bingo! I was now good to go and ushered to a support technician who greeted me in heavy, accented English, very hard to understand. I too have an accented English, not to mention a contact lens migrating from both sides of my mouth in a sea of saliva. While I asked the tech person to repeat most of his questions, I finally managed to explain my technical predicament with my “Accuvue-French-tainted accent”, made sense of the procedure, managed not to swallow the lens, focused hard to apply his instructions and got my iPod back to life. Now, I can multitask!