The phone card debacle

Yesterday I bought my very first international phone card. It is a $5 Digame phone card with a picture of what I can only assume is a really enthusiastic futbol fan with the Mexican flag painted on his face. This card was purchased at the request of my boyfriend so that we could talk to each other on the phone. The brand was suggested by the wonderful Mexican man who owns the party store by my house. This phone card has instructions that are written entirely in Spanish.

Allow me to set the record straight. I do not hablo Espanol. I have been studying for about 4 or 5 months now but am by no means a fluent Spanish speaker. I wouldn't even consider myself conversationally fluent. As of four months ago my vocabulary consisted of what little i retained from the year and a half of Spanish classes I took in high school (which was roughly 12 years ago) and other words usually only used in a kitchen (butter= mantequilla, lettuce = lechuga, chicken= pollo, salad= ensalada, etc.). It wasn't until I started dating a Mexican who speaks very little English that I decided maybe I should go back to high school Spanish and refresh things like the days of the week, or the months of the year.

All of my Spanish knowledge comes from working with a bunch of Mexicans and Guatemalans, the recent purchase of My Spanish Coach for Nintendo DS, Dictionary.com's translation page and Spanish word of the day e-mail, and this fantastic site on the web called Spanishpod101.com.

Attempting to read the instructions in fine print on the back of a Spanish phone card is a lot more difficult than one would think. I spent roughly 30 minutes reading the words out loud and taking the ones I recognized from high school, music, and my attempts at teaching myself Spanish and began to read between the lines.

All of this frustration only turned up the knowledge that the finely printed information I was reading were not in fact directions. They were instead the finely printed legal material they print on phone cards to tell you what exactly you're paying for.

After all of that I realized there was a list of phone numbers associated with different locations near Chicago, and that for every location they had two columns of phone numbers one labeled Espanol, and one labeled English.
So I called one of the English numbers for Chicago where I was greeted by a woman's voice telling me, in English, to enter my pin number.

Pin number?

I don't remember reading anything on that card that even remotely resembled any sort of pin number. Crap.

It took me another ten or so minutes to realize that like many phone cards there is a little strip of material that you scratch off (not unlike a lotto ticket) to reveal your pin number. So I called the number back and entered my pin, was prompted to enter the number I wished to call. So I dialed and suddenly a man started talking to me in Spanish about numbers. I then realized that my wonderful boyfriend when typing out the exact numbers to dial to call him forgot to mention that you need to add a 1 after the country code when dialing cell phones in Mexico.
It took me 4 tries before I finally connected to him.

Then after 2 minutes of jumbled talk the call was lost. I tried to call back and got nothing.
I am no closer to mastering the concept of international calling than I was a week ago. But I have learned that even in Spanish, fine print is meant to be ignored.