Losing a cell phone is never a good thing, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I imagined when I first realized I couldn’t find it last Sunday morning. As luck would have it, I had just added a 500 peso prepaid card the night before. Fortunately, it was an inexpensive phone. I had a total credit of about 1750 on my prepaid balance when I lost the phone, so between the air time and the cost of the phone, it was like losing $125.00.
In Mexico, it is unlikely that the man on the street who finds your phone will return it. It would have been very easy for someone to look through my stored numbers and find my home number or simply call any of the local numbers on the phone to find a way to contact me. I didn’t really expect that to happen, but I was hopeful. I waited two days before doing anything about the missing phone.
On Tuesday morning I decided there had been adequate time for someone to get my phone back to me, and it was time to replace it. A friend advised me to go to the Telcel Customer Service Center at the Centro Maya mall in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Of course, there was the obligatory line to stand in, but the wait wasn’t terrible… about 20 minutes. Our customer service representative was very helpful and spoke much better English than my Spanish. He deactivated the lost phone, transferred my number to a new phone, and also transferred my remaining prepaid balance to the new phone. The prepaid balance was about 300 pesos less than when I lost the phone, but I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to transfer the balance at all. My cheap replacement phone, a Motorola C139, and the fee to transfer the phone number totaled a little less than $500 MX. So losing my cell phone was more like losing $50 instead of $100. Probably a more significant loss was my stored phone numbers.
Lessons learned – hang on to my cell phone and backup my phone list.
You can pay your CFE electric bill in many places including most banks or any OXXO convenience store. You can also pay at the CFE offices. They have a walkup and drive thru 24 hour self service tellers. It is my understanding that these teller machines are cash only. I usually pay my electric bill at my bank who charges me a small service fee for the convenience.
