I recently switched from AT&T (nee Bellsouth) DSL to Comcast Cable.  Thus far, I'm happy with the switch.  In doing so, I'm effectively losing my Bellsouth.net email address.  In my mind I did not consider this to be any sort of show stopper, or even a hiccup, or even the tiniest monkey wrench in the work: I rarely, if ever, used that email account for anything.  Except my Apple ID.

"Hey, that's no problem, right?  I'll just log in to the Apple website and change my account information, easy peasy, nice and easy, "  I thought.  Don't ask why I used a mangled catch-phrase from a 1970s British commercial for lemony dish soap.  So that's what I did: I logged into Apple's website, changed my account ID, and *poof* it was done.  A simple sign-out/sign-in from iTunes Store via the iTunes application and I'm all done.

Except...

Well, once you do that, things get a little wonky.  Not wonky in the way that, say, a link doesn't work unless you click it twice.  Not wonky in the way that that one cute girl's eyes seem to be looking ever so slightly at two different points.  No, I'm talking about wonky in the way that if you attempt to login to iTunes via your iPhone and attempt to download an application -- even a free one -- you get the "You cannot buy a download at this time.  Your account is disabled."  It's even wonkier, but more helpful, in the iTunes app on your PC.  You are at least directed to contact iTunes support, which is the rest of the error message that is unhelpfully missing from the iPhone error display.

After a trip to the Apple.com Support site, I got a case number, located the phone number (the scheduled "call me back" bit didn't appear to work), and dialed up some genius at Apple.  Imagine my surprise when I was greeted by a guy who sounded like he was in college in southern California.  Wait, that can't be right, it's 7am out on the west coast... Maybe it was a guy in college in Illinois.  Anyway, that's not important.  It's just a guy, and he wasn't Indian.  Or if he was, he certainly did well in his ESL or American Dialects course.  Not that I have a problem with that, in fact, during my quest to shed my life of AT&T DSL, which is part of a greater scheme to divest myself of anything to do with the former Bellsouth, I have spent a few moments on the phone with Vonage and their number transfer department, which seems to be situated in Mumbai or Chennai.  I'm not sure.  And by the way, on that front, the number transfer is in process, and as soon as it's complete, my phone number formerly held by Bellsouth will be hosted by Vonage.  Thank you, technology!  Perhaps once Apple decides to get out of bed with AT&T I can move my iPhone somewhere's else too, but I'm not holding my breath for that.

So after about 10 minutes of chatting and intermittent holds while my guy talked to iTunes support, he said, "Why don't you go ahead and give it a try."  And... Success!  I inquired as to the source of the problem, expecting to get some trite explanation watered down for the masses, but instead was treated to an explanation of the root error, an "S error during authentication, so I routed it to Tier 2 iTunes support and they are frantically working to resolve this as it seems to be popping up quite a bit, so you'll likely see a new version of iTunes out very shortly."

Color me impressed, at least with Apple Support.  Not so much with iTunes and iPhone, at the moment, but at least I was finally able to download that fart generator.