The Mexican White Male Elephant
According to an Asian legend, white elephants are considered sacred because one of them appeared to Buddha’s mother before his birth. For that reason, kings used to have one for good luck. On the other hand, white elephants were so costly to maintain and so difficult to get rid of that the person who owned one frequently went broke. Mexico does not have one white elephant, indeed Mexico has two. The first one was born when the Mexican government decided to privatize TELMEX, the national communication and telephone company. “Fortunately” for Mexicans, it turned out to be a female elephant, because it happened that within a decade she gave birth to a magnificent fat healthy white male elephant, TELCEL, the first cellular telephone company in Mexico. Making Mexicans pay astonishing monthly telephone and cell phone bills, these two monopolies of the communication sector have caused extensive damage to the domestic economy of all Mexicans. The weakness of the Mexican antimonopoly laws allowed annual sales of TELCEL to be higher than the annual IRS collected taxes. The two enterprises have made of its owner the richest man of the world. The outrageous prices, the atrocious customer service, and the bad connectivity are other misfortunes that Mexicans have to deal with.
In my own experience, after several years of religiously paying a two hundred and fifty dollar per month bill for my “unlimited” cell phone plan, I believed that I had access to all services that my cell phone company could offer, even more so because I had the latest Blackberry version. Not so! Destiny had in store for me a very big surprise. When I had to travel out of my country for business, I carried with me my new fancy cell phone. Once there, I didn’t have any trouble keeping in touch with my office and my Mexican customers. After five days, I went back to Mexico, content because thanks to my cell phone, I had kept up with all my tasks such as checking email, chatting with friends, making and answering business calls from Mexico and so on while I was abroad. A week later, I almost fainted when I received my cell phone bill. The amount was exactly five hundred fifty four dollars and seventy four cents! But I almost died when I received another bill for three thousand four hundred and sixty three dollar for mobile internet services. Of course, I would fight tooth and nail to avoid paying such abuse, but I could not imagine yet the magnitude of the battle that I was going to fight.
My first reaction was to call the company immediately. I wanted to take advantage of my rage to beat whoever tried to oppose me. However, after almost twenty minutes of waiting on line, being transferred from one operator to another, and having given my personal data more than five times, I was fresher than a turkey two days before Thanksgiving. When I finally reached the right person to talk to, I had lost my touch, so in frustration I bore the long specifications and explanations that he recited to me about my contract. I felt a cold sweat run down my spine when he nonchalantly told me that if I did not pay those bills quickly, the company would block all the lines linked to my plan. I was helpless and lost before such power. Nobody in the customer service office could help me, so I began a pilgrimage through uncountable offices, locations, and people full of indifference and mistreatment. Finally, after all those struggles, I managed to get a miserable ten percent discount only on the internet services part, and they reluctantly agreed to spread the total amount over twelve monthly payments with no interest. I had to pay, like all my Mexican fellow countrymen always do, if I wanted to be “connected”. And that is a whole other subject.
Even though TELCEL’s connectivity inside Mexico has improved a little bit, every cell phone call that I make, and every cell phone conversation that I receive, is interrupted in the midst of its catharsis due to a failure in TELCEL’s connectivity. Additionally, trying to use a Mexican cell phone service overseas is a nightmare because it is almost impossible to find a TELCEL connection. When I travel abroad, I look with bitterness at the endless list of all those international cell phone company icons scrolling on my cellular device’s display, but never do I see passing on it the icon of my singular “lovely” Mexican cell phone company.
In conclusion, there are millions, if not tens of millions of stories among Mexican cellular users similar to mine. However, all TELCEL clients day by day suffer the burden of paying super expensive rates, receiving pathetical customer service, and dealing with appallingly erratic connectivity. The worst part in this economic ordeal is that there are no signs in sight of any change in this status quo. The laws against monopolies in Mexico are too soft to beat such giants. Consequently, for the moment, I will just continue dreaming of fifty dollar monthly bills for unlimited calls and mobile internet service included.
No comments:
Post a Comment