Sao Paulo Letter: If you've ever been irritated by the stranger beside you on a bus or a restaurant nattering into their mobile phone, you'll certainly feel for the human phoneboxes of Bolivia.
Easily spotted all over the country in their brightly coloured bibs, these are people employed by phone companies to wander around towns and cities with mobile phones that the public can rent out for as little as 10 cent a minute for a local call.
Their days consist of dialling numbers for members of the public and then having to stand and listen to conversations about how someone will be five minutes late, 10 minutes late, wants to meet somewhere else or can't remember where they are supposed to meet in the first place . . . among other riveting topics. All day.
It is no wonder that most of them look bored out of their minds.
And there is no escape. To prevent theft, the phone is attached to the human phonebox by a chain, so no dialling the number for customers and then walking out of earshot.
But in a country where paying jobs are hard to come by there is no shortage of people willing to work in this new industry, which sprang up following privatisation and deregulation of the telecoms sector five years ago.
In much of South America, nowhere more so than in Bolivia, there is still anger at the wave of privatisation that swept the region during the 1990s. It is not hard to find people in Argentina who will tell you how privatisations are slowly bleeding the country to death because every time they make a phone call more money leaves the country and heads for Spain or Italy in the form of profits for Telefónica or Telecom Italia.
But nowadays there are at least phones everywhere. Brazilians tell stories about how before deregulation of their telecoms sector they had to wait years to get a landline, a major cause of celebration when one was finally installed in a house.
Some Argentines remember wistfully the old days. Back then, landlines were also difficult to get installed and booking a foreign call required the patience of a saint.
But there were compensations. If you knew someone in the state phone company (and lots of people did as it was massively overstaffed) you could not only skip the queue for a phone with a quiet word or monetary tip to the right person, but even be lucky enough to have your phone bill sent to a different address.
The genius of this scam was that the person receiving the bill would send it back to the company pointing out the error and the company's bureaucracy would spend a lifetime trying to find out who should pay it. Freefone, Argentine style.
Those who defend the region's privatisations point out that such a situation left South America dangerously unprepared for the onset of the internet age, broadband and the central role of telecommunications in the new globalised economy.
Fortunes were made in the privatisations, but fortunes were invested in upgrading networks, say supporters. Critics contend that those investments could have been made by the state, overlooking the fact the states were near bankruptcy and the state telecom companies were models of waste and inefficiency.
Today, telecoms are largely in the hands of private companies, most of them foreign and ironically many of them former European state-owned monopolies, themselves the product of privatisation.
Opponents have called them the new conquistadores. But if they are shipping gold back to Europe, this time at least they are offering something in exchange other than slavery, smallpox and the odd colonial church.
Thanks to their investments, making a call in most of South America is now hassle-free and relatively cheap.
It might have been cheaper under the old state system, but the problem back then was actually making the call at all.
Getting a landline installed in Argentina or Brazil today is quick, broadband too. In Bolivia and Uruguay most blocks have a locutorio - a shop with phone booths and computer terminals where you can ring anywhere with a meter in front of you telling you exactly how much your call is costing.
The main annoyance in these places is the amount of kids playing online shoot-'em-up video games at top volume on the computer terminals - a popular alternative in countries where many middle-class families cannot afford a PlayStation.
But there are still ghosts from the old days circulating in this new ultra-modern world. Directory inquiries seems to have an unusual habit of connecting customers to numbers that an automated voice, from the same phone company as inquiries, then tells callers do not exist.
Luckily though, a second call to inquiries will usually, unprompted, come up with a different number that does ring. And on you go with your business.
