Blackwood for engineers

Most bridge players are familiar with the Blackwood convention, which asks your partner how many aces they have by a 4NT bid. This falls down when a pair is made up of two software engineers who understand numbers "zero", "one", and "many". (Yes, we did have not one but two hands last night where we miscounted/misbid the number of aces we had and so had a grand slam down one where the small slam was in, why do you ask?)