Wrong numbers…

 “If everybody has more than enough, what good is my more-than-enough?”

(A Walk on the Wild Side, Nelson Algren, 1956)

From 1894, when the Subterranean Telephone Company was first trying to get a contract to lay lines, home telephone service was something of a luxury in Mexico City.  When I first moved to the Federal District (a century and a decade later), one statistic I uncovered was that there were more home lines per capita in Botswana than in Mexico.  I had mostly been writing tech manuals for telephone companies before I moved to Mexico, so was at least somewhat aware of the big problem TelMex was having — not their privatization so much as homologation.  Going back to 1894, when Porfirio Diaz was starting to worry about overdependence on single-source foreign suppliers, Mexican telephone companies used both Seimans and Bell switches.  Seimans switches are configued in a series of 2 –  XX-XX-XX and Bell switches 3 and  2 — XXX-XX-XX.  Canada and the U.S. always used Bell switches, and post_NAFTA Mexican phone switching stations were being replaced.

At the same time, Mexican incomes were rising and more telephone lines were needed — for faxes, computers, etc.  And, yes, Carlos Slim wanted to make a profit.

So, home lines were outrageously expensive, especially if you didn’t make a lot of calls, or you were — like I was initially — a wetback (I didn’t come across the Rio Grande doing the backstroke, but I did ride a bus in, and overstayed my tourist visa)  the backstroke.

Ex-pats tend to be hanging out with  foreign teachers and executives and students… the kinds of people who had some plausible reason to get a cell phone.  They weren’t expensive (you could buy a whole TelCel kit for about 300 pesos), but you had to buy a card for your calls, and that was expensive.  Especially if you were doing something not always steady like …. oh, teaching English to executives

Fresas, naturally, made them chic, but a lot of people actually had a use for the damn things — taxi drivers, plumbers, working mom, bank robbers — were all buying phones too.  When there was still some cachet to having a cell phone, even gangsters discovered their advantages.  You could call in a kidnapping — or even better — cell phone users supposedly having money, call in a threatened kidnapping.

There was an e-mail going around at the time:  “You know you live in Mexico City…” one of which was “When you go out for dinner and the number of cell phones on the table outnumber the silverware.”

Almost true.  But not quite everyone can afford the phones (or, more to the point, needs a phone available 24-7).  These days, NOT having a cell phone is something of a social stigma (unless you’re so rich, you have somebody else to carry a phone for you).  And, alas, some folks will do anything to get a phone.

Mexico City’s police chief, Joel Ortega, is blaming the six percent increase in reported robberies on… you got it… cell phones.

You don’t need a phone card and phone booth to call the police to report the robbery…. unless, of course, it was your cell phone that was swiped.