When I first arrived up in the mountains of Mexico, I was constantly reminded of what Dorothy said to Toto in "The Wizard of Oz". I thought daily, we are not in midtown Manhattan anymore.
I had retired early from a lucrative management consulting practice and I was looking forward to the changes in lifestyle and environment that I expected to find in the colonial village of San Miguel de Allende, 6500 feet high up in the mountains in the geographical middle of Mexico. Quaint and still historically original, this cultural tourist destination was the birthplace of Mexico's revolution and the new home for a thriving population of some 4,000 English-speaking expatriates, ranging in age from 40-something to 103 (yes, 103). I was excited. And, as Dorothy might have noted, there were vast differences between Manhattan (and not the one in Kansas) and my new home, Oz.
Hearing that buying English-language software and English-language hardware was difficult to do in Mexico, I had moved here with my new (it was 1993, remember) 486 PC. It wasn't very long before I discovered that the initial problems were not in the hardware or software but in the electricity, Outages every month (or even more often) meant that USPs were necessary, spikes and brownouts meant that we did not use surge protectors (those were necessary but only useful for TVs and refrigerators). We used 20-pound (6" x 7" x 12") Sola reguladores made in Mexico for Mexican electricity. Now, many years later, we don't seem to need them any more, but we still have outages (poor little us). However, our outages now occur only maybe two times a year and then only for a few minutes to a few hours. Actually, I was thinking "poor us" again this past summer until the day I heard my beloved NYC was smack in the middle of an entire eastern seaboard outage that lasted much much longer. I can only think that that was progress for all of us.
Obviously, I brought my experience with me. I was an acknowledged expert in the earliest business need for PCs., the spreadsheet. I used Symphony (Lotus' own successor to 1-2-3) (which was also the predecessor to MS Excel and MS Works and other multi-use software). I created elegant and mammoth spreadsheets to help my clients (and incidentally myself) invest, minimize taxation, manage their lives and businesses, and plan for everything, among still other uses. I created elaborate Symphony Command Language Macros to automate the operation of these spreadsheets that made them time-responsive and sing out information (to the amazement of my clients, but eventually to my own mystification). As a result, I decided that one of the first volunteer jobs I would undertake in San Miguel was to aid, pro bono, profit making organizations and non-profit charities. But, apparently the cultural differences not only negated such usage in the profit making businesses (apparently profits here are not AS important as they are in the USA), and these differences also took over gringo charitable organizations and they, too, were not interested in even the simplest spreadsheet. I was amazed to see a "so-called spreadsheet" created by a older gringo woman that had all of the look of an ordinary spreadsheet except the totals and other calculations were ALSO typed in, just like in the old hand-written spreadsheets. What wonders a new lifestyle and land can create in someone who should have known better.
On the other hand, as this town was internationally famous as a haven for its creative people (Mexicans and foreigners alike), it did not take long for artists to adapt computers to their creative needs as did writers and musicians and others. Before long, there was an influx of "computer experts" to fill a new void. Of course, in no time, the "experts" were outflanked by the artists who learned to use their new medium and fix it themselves whenever necessary, all the while learning, inventing, and creating in their own artistic fields.
I did my best to keep up with the state of the art (including all of the even newer arts). I continued my subscriptions to various magazines (PC World and PC Computing, until its demise) and the Satellite-TV east coast feeds of the networks were, wonder of wonders, my old NYC TV stations, CBS-2, NBC-4, Fox-5, and ABC-7. What more could I ask? I guess I could have wished for a business-like approach to computers and their usage. But, that might have hindered my own Mexicanization and enjoyment of life "as it is" as opposed to life as I might have hoped it would be.
About the time that I got here, email and surfing the web became a high-priority thing in the USA and since we were further away (note: using snail mail, a letter seemed to take a minimum of 30 days round trip), computers and email became a priority even among the very oldest of the gringos. While I did experience the occasional "brilliant writer, speaker, thinker" who could not (his mental block, of course) figure out how to turn a computer on or off, many (even most) of the 70 and older crowd took to it just like children. Granted most of them did not want to learn what computers can do other than in communicating, but communication became its reason for being.
As a result, the local Biblioteca Publica (the largest bi-lingual library in all of Mexico) started giving classes in email and surfing. Attended and understood by most of the expatriate population, in no time at all, the creation of internet cafes at the rate of 2 to 5 to a block became a shock to my eyes. Soon email, followed by chat (first just typing, later both voice and still later webcam), came to be used by the eagerly communicative expatriates to keep in touch with their children and friends in "the old country". This was caused somewhat as a reaction to a TelMex monopoly in Mexico. As economically useful as long distance phone calls may seem to you jaded New Yorkers, do remember that you have benefited from the "toll wars" that Sprint, Verizon, ATT etc fought in the USA, while these wars have yet to occur in the life of we helpless customers of the still-Monopoly TelMex. So communication flourished on the internet.
Replacing my equipment has not been easy, at least at first. As I stated earlier, I brought my new 486 with me when I moved here in 1994. Some time later, around 1998, I wanted a newer computer and I had a Pentium I assembled generically in town. It was merely OK as the CD-Rom drive and modem eventually caused problems and repairs were tougher because of the language and location difficulties. So, in 2001 I had a Pentium III -imported from Dell Latin American Division (in Austin TX). That was kind of strange. Dell could not see the differences between sending an English-language Austin-ordered computer to Mexico and sending the higher-priced Mexican version (with English software and hardware) to Mexico. And the tech support in Texas did not know how to FDISK a hard drive or how to make their sold-and-installed Iomega Zip Drive work without the software that they said they don't provide for a Zip Drive. Ultimately, I kludged it all to my satisfaction, but the extra effort made me think there must be a better way in the future.
Acquisition of newer Software. I continued with DOS (as I loved the Lotus products such as Symphony, Agenda, Magellan, and a few others) until Win95 came along when I pretty much operated using both DOS and Windows. I never used multi-tasking in Win95 since it crashed too often so I used the DOS QEMM multi-tasking DesqView and was quite pleased with it. But progress is always an option. When I obtained the Pentium III, I started to use Win XP and became quite satisfied with it and, except for the 3 aforementioned Lotus programs, now use DOS software very seldom. But, how to obtain newer software. Can't do that at local stores because, even in this gringo town, Spanish language software is to be expected. Ahhhh, there is the internet coming to the rescue.
The economics of life here is quite pleasant. While we gringos are being accused of increasing the costs of living by paying our maids and other employees more than they were previously paid, which of course, causes the costs to keep going up, still the costs of housing and other expenses are significantly lower than they were in the USA (even back in 1993, the date of my latest cost memories) but they seem to be getting closer every day. One should know, though, that the ability to work for income here is severely limited by the Mexican government where working papers are only issued to those who supply a needed talent that is not supplied by Mexicans. So, you techies who think you can help teach the computer-illiterate how to "do it", you are too late, that need has already been met many times over by both gringos and Mexicans.
Charitable work, pro bono work, work that ONLY pays psychic income, on the other hand, is plentiful. For those of you who no longer need income from working and would love the life that living here provides, welcome. There are many, many, many needs, and many, many, many worthwhile charitable organizations that can use your help. One of my greatest pleasures in life has been to set up a USA corporation, registered with IRS, that gives money to needy Mexican people. For more information, see its web-site at http://www.geocities.com/mpwinsma/toc.htm but do remember that this is not an indication of my professional ability as I merely created this one web-site for my own use (never expecting to have to make it more than merely functional).
Well, that's it from this older gringo who loved his life in Manhattan and loves, even more, his retirement (that's a funny word as I work harder here than I had there) in San Miguel de Allende.
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Copyright 2003 Michael Wein