Bogota Blogger

Like just about everyone living in Bogota, I have had coflicts with the phone company, known as ETB. Many months I would sign up for some sort of long distance plan, which would usually involve getting a package of minutes for a certain price to the US. One month, when I paid $100,000 pesos for unlimited calls to one US number and a discounted rate on other US numbers, when the bill arrived I had been charged almost $1.00 US per minute for every call.

Now, the only way to deal with ETB is to go to an office, take a number, and wait an hour or several hours. There happens to be an office near my house, so I went in about five minutes before closing, when it was slow, got my number, and then refused to leave when they asked me to come back another day because they wanted to close. One of the first things you learn in Bogota is to be persistent, you MUST be persistent, if you want to ever get anywhere.

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Utilities in Bogota are attached to the property, and therefore the responsibility of the property owner. This means that the telephone number goes with the house, and whoever moves in or out will have that number. So, you might get calls on your phone for someone who lived there three or four tenants ago. The same is true or the other utilites–the service is attached to the property, not the occupant.

This has a couple of implications–one being that the tenant has no choice in what services are provided and who provides them. I suppose this didn’t used to be an issue when there was just one company for each public utility, but these days there are several companies who provide telephone service, for example, and the landlord gets to decide who will provide it in his property.

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