Documentary : Mexico's Phone Follies : Trying to make a call from south of the border is a test in patience. If you get a dial tone, then pray you don't lose it.

By MARJORIE MILLER

June 30, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MEXICO CITY — When Telefonos de Mexico stock plunged a few days ago, everyone blamed Ross Perot for pooh-poohing free trade, and telephone company workers for planning to sell their shares.

But I know what really happened: Word finally got out about Mexico’s dreadful telephone service. Although, how it got out is a bit of a mystery since the phones so often don’t work. It is said that when Telmex stock started to drop on Wall Street, Mexicans raced to the phones to try to calm U.S. investors. But they couldn’t get a line.

If you put two resident businessmen in the same room, eventually they will trade telephone horror stories like soldiers exchanging battle tales. The competition is to see whose life has been made more completely miserable by Mexico’s supposedly new, improved and recently privatized telephone company.

I, of course, believe no one could be unhappier than a journalist for whom the telephone is a kind of life-support system. But anyone who has used a telephone in Mexico knows the aggravation. It looks like a telephone, it feels like a telephone, so why doesn’t it behave like a telephone?

When I pick up the receiver in the morning to make my first call, I know any number of things might happen--including nothing. I wait. I jiggle the phone. I hang up and try again. Eventually I shout obscenities. They say that most damaged public phones were vandalized not by rowdies but by irate citizens trying to make a call. I understand. Once I do get a tone and dial a number, again I may find that nothing happens. Silence. The sound of my call dropping into a black hole.

In the event I actually reach the party I am trying to call, my conversation may be interrupted by an ear-shattering, electronic shriek--what I imagine it would sound like if a dentist were to drill a hole through my skull.

Mexican telephones, like riots and famine, do not bring out the best in people, particularly when those people are on the phone and suddenly find their lines crossed. The response is never pretty and usually goes something like this:

Caller No. 1: “Hey, your line just cut into ours. Would you hang up, please?”

Caller No. 2: (irritated): “No, your line crossed ours. You hang up.”

Caller No. 3: (loudly to No. 1): “Let’s continue; they’ll hang up.” Caller No. 4: (shouting to No. 2): “So, as I was saying. . . .”

This battle of wills continues until someone finally gives up the precious--if crowded--connection.

Telephone etiquette generally is in short supply. I suppose I contribute my share of rudeness. The phone rings and I reply with a standard “Bueno,” which is short for “Good morning.”

The caller, suspecting he has reached a wrong number, says, “Where am I calling?” My response depends on how many wrong numbers I have received and dialed that day.

At midday, as I am trying to talk over a line of static or braying donkeys, I begin to think about engaging Telmex Chairman Carlos Slim in hand-to-hand combat.

Slim’s Grupo Carso, in partnership with St. Louis-based Southwestern Bell and the French company, France Telcom, purchased a controlling interest in Telmex about 18 months ago, leading us to believe that service would improve. Admittedly, theirs is an unenviable--albeit lucrative--task. They bought an under-capitalized company with technology that was half a century out of date. Mexico has five phone lines per 100 people compared to 50 lines per 100 people in the United States. The company intends to increase that to 10 lines per 100 people by 1994 and 20 lines per 100 by the year 2000. To meet their goal, they must install 4.5 million new lines a year.

Nearly half the company’s lines are in the Mexico City area, where they are under siege from a rat population that finds the lines tasty, and from a five-month annual rainy season that seems to drown the lines but not the rats.

Francisco Hernandez, secretary general of the telephone workers union, says Telmex receives an average of 13,000 complaints a day--20,000 if it rains.

Hernandez’s office is adorned with statues of Don Quixote--a disturbing sight given the task at hand. “No,” Hernandez insisted. “The challenge of providing good telephone service is not Utopian.”

Hmmm . . . Maybe. Meanwhile, why is it that I sometimes pick up telephone conversations more clearly on the receiver of my baby monitor than on my telephone?

Once every month or so, depending on the rains and on my standing with the telephone god, one of my office or home lines will simply die. Often, the line goes dead when a Telmex repairman fixes a neighbor’s phone--presumably the result of an inadvertent slip of the pliers while working in an overcrowded telephone box.

Getting your telephone fixed requires the patience of Mother Teresa, good political connections or the personal acquaintance of a telephone repairman who will fix it if you are willing to offer “tips.” Rumor is that tips run about $50.

Some people have tried to resolve the problem with cellular telephones, which also don’t work so well because of their overabundance. Other people have tried to purchase a second line, the idea being that they won’t both fail at once. One friend has been waiting five months for her second line. She has yet to receive the new number, but did get a bill for it listing calls to London. Telmex generously rectified that problem.

By the end of a busy workday, as I sit at my desk trying to make a call, I stare out my window toward a monument of the Aztec Emperor Cuauhtemoc and fight the urge to climb to the top and heave phones at the ground. And all the while I pray my phone will not go dead. Especially now, because after this story it will never get fixed.