Caribbean - Poor but Mobile

i think the cell phone thing is out of hand. we’ve been somehow brainwashed into believing that we cant be disconnected for a second.

That’s true. I always ask, “what did we do before cell phones”? We went along with life as usual. Now, people let technology rule their loves. I’m also amazed when I hear someone say, “I didn’t sleep last night”, and the reason is that they keep their phones on at night, and someone called them in the wee hours of the morning to chat. Why not turn the phone off? If it’s an emergency, the likelihood is that the people who need you in such a situation ahve your home number. Plus, if you can’t get to the phone, if it’s important, the person will leave a voicemail. Well, we hope so!

its all about perception… do all poor people think they are poor?

i had this very conversation with my barber when Digicel first came to TrinBago. He found it very good that people were now able to afford a phone. My argument was that OK they can purchase it, what about maintenance…

similarly, many people want to own a car and only see the showroom price. they don’t see the big picture which includes insurance, gas, tires, accidents…

we all pretend to not want to keep up with the Jones’ but we do all that we can to one up them…

Capitalists love us because we buy into everything they sell us…

one more thing… are the poor people the ones with the expensive phones?

[…] Foreign Perspectives | News and editorial on life in the south of France, a series on how to move he… wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt […]

…. yesterday I saw a policeman chatting on his cell …. while in the middle of the road (Diego Martin Main Road, Trinidad) directing traffic!!!!

I think that when you’re not well off, you will look at the cell phone thing a little differently.

There are two things that potential employers ask for nowadays - a phone contact and an email address.

There are a host of web cafes all over the country now, so checking your email is easy. But when you live in an area that is remote, that the telecom is loathe to go to run cable, or the copper cable is constantly being cut, your cell phone becomes your lifeline in every sense of the word - work, play and in case of emergency.

Buy-in for a cell phone is less than a land line too now that the providers compete so fiercely on calling rates. Pay-as-you-go is far easier for someone with unsteady income than their waiting on a bill to come monthly that you might or might not be able to handle.

It’s easy to say that we used to do without the connectedness, but that’s not the world that we live in anymore. We are far beyond the days where Tantie down the road had the only landline in the village and it was used as everybody’s message service.

As for the Policeman on the phone, that’s a matter for personal and professional discretion. And it applies really to everyone in a work setting, not just the goodly officer who may have just as well been reporting back to his Station on the traffic situation.