I’ve been practicing this sentence for weeks now: “Thank you, but I would prefer that it be replaced, as I understand that this is a known defect.”
See, our Xbox has been broken for a while, and we really, really like playing Halo 3. Nick sent an email to customer service, and they replied that he would have to call…customer service.
“Isn’t that, you know, them?” I asked.
“Don’t think too hard about it.”
I accept that, for the most part, I will be the call-maker of the household; that’s fine, and it makes sense to me. But I resisted this one for several reasons:
- I never actually saw the Xbox do the thing that meant it was broken,
- I was in no way involved in the purchase or installation of the Xbox,
- Nick’s email to customer service was perfectly fine, French-wise, and
- I really had no idea what to say, other than the sentence at the top of this post. If the rep had any response to that other than “Okay; immediately!” I was stuck.
“You could just call and ask for someone who speaks English–the times when I don’t ask, they usually end up offering anyway,” I whined.
“I couldn’t!” Nick snapped, from which I inferred that this was a sorer spot than I had realized…like, perhaps he had already tried calling, and it hadn’t gone well enough to mention.
Halo 3 is awesome.
So yesterday, when Nick was conveniently working from home and available to back me up, I steeled myself and dialed.
“Thank you for calling Xbox France,” the recorded French woman said. “For support in French, please press 1.”
You know what comes after that, right? I mean, really; it was the first thing they said. Painfully aware that I had already ceded the moral high ground when I had waited so many weeks to make the call, I held onto the phone and settled for hissing, “You never called this number” to Nick.
“Why do you say that?” he asked evasively. Gotcha.
It was a good thing that he was there, anyway. The lovely tech (with the subtlest of Indian accents) wanted to trouble-shoot, and I had no idea how to plug the thing back in after Nick had taken it out to get the serial number. In fact, she had a whole bunch of questions that only he could answer, and I wonder what she thought when I kept repeating them to him–in English–before relaying his answer back. In English.
Doesn’t matter; the process is under way. It’s just a few more weeks before I get to shoot all the aliens I want.
Oh, and Harry Potter in French? So nifty. Snape is Rogue; Hogwarts translates to something like Baconlice; they use Mr. and Mrs., but change all of the measurements into metric. Plus some of the common and useful phrases that I never managed to get straight (like “on the other hand” and “among” and “wizard“) are repeated often enough that they’re actually starting to stick.
So the next time I have to call someone and say, “On the other hand, I am among wizards,” I won’t even have to practice first.