¡WhatsAppeame!
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
In the late
80s when I first returned to my Buenos Aires after having left it in 1967 I
found that little had changed that was obvious. When I visited my half brother
Enrique in his office in the financial district you could almost not see the
sky because of the hundreds of phone cables.
Buenos Aires was never as bad as San Paulo in those years. In San Paulo
you had to have accounts with two phone companies in order to call from one
phone number to another.
Such was
the “pulpo” (octopus) of phone lines that communications in BA in those late
80s was spotty at best. All changed with the advent of the cell phone.
Now BA in
March of 2017 has been liberated and the skies in the financial district are free of cables. Everybody had a cell phone. You see people
glued to them in buses, trains, subtes and on the streets. There is a city
ordinance in the works that will place low lying cameras in crosswalks to catch
offenders.
And yet my
nephew Georgito O’Reilly regularly calls and receives calls from his very large
extended family or from his boss inviting him to play golf on a weekend, while
he drives on the many BA freeways. I have never seen Georgito use his turn
signals. But he is not as bad as his son Jorge who once scared me almost to
death when I caught him proudly punching a phone number in one hand while
steering and driving with the other. I believe that Georgito has only been
warned once on his car phone habit.
Communications,
as in instant ones, in BA are all done with texting. If you want to communicate
with your friends and relatives in BA from Vancouver (or in BA when your phone
is shut off for roaming (Telus is super expensive) then one resorts to WiFi and
either Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. It is much more effective than the now
clunky, almost useless Skype. I attempted to use Skype today and I have been
blocked by them until I upload the “improved” version. I have kissed them
goodbye.
