Ingenuity and Telephones
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It could
have exploded. Ben woke up and automatically reached for his phone. The auto
reach; it is a generational thing. The phone was so hot it burned his hand. He
jerked the plug from the phone and from the power strip. The power cord
connection to the phone had melted into the phone. The cord itself was fried. He
said, “I’ve never heard of this kind of problem.”
Oh, man; Oh,
crickets; Have to buy a new phone. Ben, of course, has one of those phones with
which he does everything. It is his lifeline to the world. And they don’t come
free in Cracker Jacks.
Nevertheless,
Ben cleaned the plastic mess as best he could and, with Leo, went in search of
a new phone cord, on the million and one chance, not really believing it would
work.
Luis, the
man at the counter reached back on the wall and pulled down the correct power
cord. Ben tried the plug. No satisfaction. It is a puzzle. Luis said, “Never
heard of such a problem.”
Luis grabbed
Ben’s phone, a strong light, a magnifying glass of, an assortment of small
tools and a razor and dismantled the device. Carefully, he carved away the
melted plastic, fiddled with this, soldered that, adjusted another thing,
burnished here, jiggled there, reassembled the phone and plugged the phone into
the new power cord. It worked. All functions are ‘go’.
Anywhere
else, any phone or electronics store in the US, and Ben would automatically be
signing up for a new phone, a new contract; we all know the drill. Ingenuity.
But this is
Mexico. Here, we fix it. Somebody will fix it. The hard part is finding the
perfect ‘fix-it’ person.
Between Ben
and me, we have three phones in the house. His state-of-the-art model. My
cheap-cheap cell and a bottom-of-the-barrel landline.
Last week my
landline went dead. What was truly puzzling is that it had also died a month
previously. Leo replaced the batteries for me. Ben took my Panasonic phone
apart, found the batteries corroded, dumped them, cleaned the gunk and read the
fine print. Leo had installed he wrong type battery. We needed a specific type
of rechargeable battery.
Leo is my
usual ‘go-to’ person to find the ‘fix-it’ person I need. When asked where to
get rechargeable batteries, Leo’s face went blank, that typical
deer-in-headlights look, I-don’t-know look.
In my praise
for Mexican ingenuity, I must add a caution. Two things of which to beware. If
asked, all Mexican men will say, “I can fix it.” even if that person has no
idea what you just asked to be fixed. If that same person does not know where
to find what you need, he likely will say, “No hay.
You cannot get it here.
Maybe in Guadalajara.” Which takes him off the hook. Ingenuity—in a different
form.
In our small
town there is an electronics tienda on every other block. So, bypassing Leo,
Ben asked Jim to cart him around store to store in search of rechargeable
batteries. How hard could this be?
In most
small towns in Mexico, stores roll down the door fronts from the hours of 2:00
to 4:00. They drove by a tienda on Mina which had a picture of my same phone in
the advertising blurbs alongside the door. The closed door. After trying two or
three other shops and not being able to make themselves understood, Jim and Ben
again drove to the small shop on Mina, the door now rolled up, shop open for
business.
Ben held up
the phone to show the woman the empty battery slots. “No hay,” she said. Ben
looked up at the thousand items hanging on the wall behind her. There in plain
sight, if only one knew what one was searching for, was a packet of the very
rechargeable batteries my phone required.
Ben pointed.
She took the battery pack off the wall. He paid. I now have a working landline
again.
Ingenuity
goes both ways. In case you ever need the word, rechargeable in Espanol is
‘recargable’ pronounced something like ray-car-ga-blay, minimal accent on ‘ga’.
That is how my ears hear it at any rate.
I try hard
to leave superstition in my childhood. I love black cats, walk beneath ladders.
How often have we heard, ‘disasters happen in threes’? What could possibly go
wrong with my super-simple, no frills cell phone? To say, ‘do not look for
disaster’ is to say ‘do not think of an orange’.
Sondra
Ashton
HDN: Looking
out my back door
January 23,
2020
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