Communication Blackout: Telephones Can Be Such Fun in Mexico!

A basic service Americans have traditionally loved to hate and one about which they complain most vociferously is the telephone. Americans have scorned the phone company for years and yet few would think of living without it. In fact, though we've hated "Ma Bell," we knew that when the chips were down and the service went south, promises to show up to fix it were always honored. We trusted that which we despised. Here in Mexico, it is a different scenario.

Many Mexicans still do not have a phone line in their homes. It simply hasn't always been available, even in fair-sized cities. Mexicans would have to go to a store that had banks of phones in small, closet-like booths inside to receive or place calls (for a price).

When I was a telephone operator for the infamous Ma Bell, I would place calls to these phone stations. The proprietor would take the name and address of the person my customer was calling and have to send a "runner" to get him or her. Then I would place the call again after an agreed-upon time when the person would show up at the station.

When residential phone service did become more widely available, it was still virtually impossible to obtain. This was because a "deposit" (bribe) was required to convince a phone company "official" (Mafioso) to get a phone line installed in your house. Even then it would take years to get it installed in your home. Sometimes more "deposits" were required.

What a house rents for in Mexico is often determined by whether or not there is a phone line in the house already. If a phone line is in the house, the landlord can rent it (extortion) for more money.

Today there still isn't universal phone line installation in Mexican homes as one finds in the States. Can you even begin to fathom a house or apartment in a fair-sized city in the States not having a phone line? Where would that be?

In our present apartment in Guanajuato, there was already a phone line installed. For that reason alone, we snatched the place immediately. When we went to the "State Owned and Operated Tel-Mex" (narcissistic monopoly), they informed us the clearly visible phone line in our apartment didn't exist-naturally!

We had to tell our landlady that without phone access there would be no Internet access. Without Internet access there would be no working. Without working there would be no money to pay the rent.

Our landlady told her influential husband who knows someone who knows someone who knows everybody (and, by the way, getting along in Mexico is entirely dependent on "who you know") and suddenly a several-year wait turned into a two-week wait. The phone service mysteriously materialized.

Some will go down to the Tel-Mex office and offer an "incentive" (bring lots of pesos) to the service guys getting into their trucks in the morning to move their service application to the top of the pile. This strategy apparently works for some with whom I've spoken.

With the difficulty involved in obtaining service, try to imagine what happens when that service goes out on you. Try to imagine just how quickly Tel-Mex moves to come out and repair your lines.

I will soon be able to tell you since our service suddenly, without a storm, without warning, stopped working.

It will very likely take Divine Intervention to get our phone turned back on.

As an American expat living in Mexico, you will sooner or later reach the point of giving up and giving in to a fact of life in Mexico. Problems in Mexico get solved when some mysterious, unknown force-totally outside you-decides to solve the problem. Solutions will never come before that point.

You can do nothing about it but sit and wait. If it gets fixed, then it gets fixed. If it doesn't, then it doesn't. Do nothing but give in to this. The Mexicans say:

"Ni Modo."