Barcelona Baby!

Last week, I attended my first Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  All told, it was fascinating, but the night before the show began, I was pickpocketed on a crowded subway train in the city.

It wasn't all that bad, since the most important thing I lost was a 3G laptop dongle taken from my backpack for connections I'd be making to file stories and browse the Web.   The theft made me reflect on how dependent I have become on modern communications technology.

The pickpocketing occurred, apparently, while I was standing and talking to a colleague on the crowded subway.  As I exited the busy train, a sweet woman told me in a Spanish accent that my backpack, carried on my back, was unzipped.

When I looked, she was right.  In fact, the backpack was unzipped in nearly all the places where there are zippers, something I would never have allowed to happen.   To my relief, my laptop was still inside and I had my ID and wallet stuffed in my front pants pocket.

I didn't report anything missing, since I knew I could figure out a backup to send stories over Wi-Fi or the press room Ethernet, with the possibility of buying or borrowing another dongle from a local wireless carrier.

Still, everybody who heard my story said Barcelona was famous for pickpockets.  "The pickpocket capital of Europe," one colleague said. "The pickpocket capital of the world!" one German reporter said.

Even the MWC authorities warned visitors to carry their purses and backpacks carefully, and not wear their MWC neck lanyards outside of the venue so as not to attract attention. MWC even offered pickpocket victims in its welcoming note the ability to get a motorcycle ride to the police station to report a theft!

Without the dongle, I found out that the Wi-Fi zones I needed to file stories and connect to the Internet were not commonplace and that the press room was usually too crowded to make an Ethernet connection.

The GSM Association, which runs the MWC, helped me set up a back-up dongle using a Sierra Wireless device over the Vodafone Spain network.  It eventually worked fine, but took three hours over two days to configure, partly because I and my helpers kept overlooking a set of network connections in my Macbook. Still, set-up could have been simpler, but we all know that just about everything involving technology can be made simpler and we are all good Monday morning quarterbacks!

I missed some meetings and keynotes at MWC, partly because of the dongle theft and partly due to a really terrible cold, which was not helped by rainy and cold weather in Barcelona nearly all week.  It was hard to miss things, given the excitement in the industry, especially with smartphones and tablets popping up all over the place.  I'm planning to try to write some retrospectives on MWC later in this space.

I'm not sure how directly connected the backpack theft and my communications problems were to one encounter I had at MWC with a stranger, but what the stranger said made me think.

The story  goes like this:  I was walking in the steady rain to one of the venue halls when a man was holding back the crowd from using a stalled escalator while making a call on his cell phone. He was obviously calling for help, but another man near me laughed and said, "Look, he's using his cell phone to fix the escalator" as a kind of remote control device.

I said back to him, "More technology acting up," just to be friendly.  

And the man said back to me, "Well, we all blame technology for our problems when there are other people around.  But it's funny how we blame other people when there are nothing but machines around."

People and machines--always fighting one another or trying to get along. It seems to be the driving relationship in my life these days.