I'M LOSING YOU.(The Talk of the Town)(mobile phone service in New York, New York and nuber portability)

Last week, around the globe, airplane radio communication was disrupted and satellite signals were lost as solar flares sent geomagnetic storms into Earth's atmosphere. Here in New York, meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg held a press conference to discuss some more banal but no less consequential signal interruptions: lost cell-phone calls. He was concerned, he said, about the "frustrating and too common" occurrence of so-called cellular dead zones (or black holes), where, for whatever reason, wireless connections are routinely thwarted. More than a hundred thousand 911 calls did not go through last year in New York as a result of mobile-phone failure, and so the Mayor has asked disgruntled customers to report the lost-call specs, by intersection and service provider. A preliminary list will be released in three weeks, so that consumers may decide, as Bloomberg put it, whether to "carry a separate phone or avoid those areas."

There are about two million more registered cell phones in the city than there are citizens, so it's safe to assume that the dead-zone line will be busy. (According to City Hall, several thousand reports were logged on the first day.) This town is teeming with Bermuda Triangles. Who doesn't have one of his own? Alongside the Plaza; outside Moe's bar, in Fort Greene; the Carl Schurz Park dog run; smack dab in the middle of the Eighty-sixth Street Transverse, just by the precinct house. The voice strobes, then disintegrates--can you hear me now, can you hear me now, I'm losing you. New York is the nation's worst major cell-phone market, according to a recent survey, and Bloomberg is not the first politician to take a stand. Last month, Senator Charles Schumer, who had already introduced a "Cell Phone Users Bill of Rights" in Congress, released a blacklist of his own, identifying sixty-five dead zones citywide. "Almost nothing makes you angrier than when you suddenly lose your cell-phone connection and can't get it back," Schumer said.

Except, of course, when you don't mind losing your cell-phone connection. The onset of static can be a blessing, handy camouflage in a tiresome conversation--Are you there? Mom? The very existence of dead zones affords you the opportunity to take a call from an odious acquaintance or in-law and then blip out before a plan can be made or a decision reached. And so false friendships, essential to the workings of ...