My iPod’s battery only lasts for 40 minutes after each charge now. Luckily it’s only six months old so still covered by guarantee, and so today I had my second experience with Apple’s service telephone. This time one of the guys who used to work at our local Mac store answered the 815 number I rang, and he was just as friendly as the Apple phone people in California were. There’s plenty of time for chatting while on the line, because either their databases are really slow or there’s just a lot of information that has to be entered. So did you escape the rain by moving to Oslo, I asked. How’s the weather today? No idea, he answered, but it’s pouring down here in Dublin!

Never fails to surprise me. That the Norwegian number I dialled may lead to a completely different country, on a perfectly crisp connection.

There are twelve Norwegians at work at the Apple call centre in Dublin right now. And Danes and Germans and Swedes and all manner of other nationalities.