I never met a tupapau in person, but I believe there is one living in our house. How else
would you explain all the problems we've been having with everything electrical or
electronic since we've been living here?... Our tupapau seems to specialize in these fields
and he has been having a ball tinkering with all our gadgetry. I wouldn't call him ill-
spirited, just mischievous. One of his favorite trick is to trigger our fax machine,
preferably in the middle of the night, have it beep and spit out a one inch print-out with
a message on it to "check date and time". Sometimes it does it only once, but other times,
the machine beeps at 3-minute interval 3 or 4 times in a row or more, until I get fed up
enough to get up and turn off the machine.... Of course the night the machine is turned
off is also the night someone tries to fax to us from some other time zone and I have to
get up to turn it back on... Sometimes also, the fax machine will beep during the day,
always for no apparent reason, and with no apparent pattern... When he is tired playing
with the fax, the tupapau looks over my shoulder when I'm working on my computer and, if I
forget to save my work for an extended period of time, he knows it is the best time to
freeze the screen, generate a fatal error message,or simply reboot the system to make me
lose all my unsaved work. At his most mischievous, the tupapau will at the same time crash
my computer and make thefax machine beep at the same time.

The tupapau has also been known to zap computer motherboards, erase files, blur our TV
reception,keep the ignition from starting our car in the morning, stop electric clocks,
and short our camcorder, but he seems to be particularly attracted to telephone
equipment... One day I was dialing the number of a well-established multinational company
in Papeete and I got a recorded message.Some sweet female voice with a Tahitian accent
kept repeating:

-"The number you have dialed doesn't match any current listing". This is the message you
usually hear when the person you're trying to reach forgets to pay his or her phone bill
(Procrastinating is a national sport in Polynesia!). But this was very unlikely to happen
to Tahiti's largest provider of hotel rooms, especially when they had just called me a
few minutes earlier!... I tried and tried again and still: -"The number you have dialed...
" I dialed our American friend Jim a few miles away and there again: --"The number you
have dialed..."

Something was obviously wrong with my phone or with the line... But on a third attempt,
I was able to reach another friend of ours who works in a hotel as a receptionist. To
make sure, I asked her to call Jim and to tell him to call me back. Jim called me back with
no problem at all and reassured me that hisphone had not been disconnected. I hung up and
tried again to call Jim... -"The number you have dialed..."

The problem was indeed with my phone.Since I was not calling him back, Jim called me again
and I asked him to call the Papeete Company for me and tell them to call me so I could talk
to them...A cumbersome system that, for the following days, was to become my only way to
communicate with some of the outside world...

What was really puzzling is that I could reach some numbers while others gave me the now
familiar message: "The number you have dialed...". Being endowed with a fairly analytical
mind, I tried to find apattern... And it suddenly struck me: all the "bad" numbers had
indeed one thing in common:They all had a "3" in them!... A quick test of this theory
proved it absolutely correct. Proud of my deduction, I looked up the phone company's
number where to report such problems... The number was...Thirteen!...

What was I to do?... Jim was not home so I called my other friend Bob who knew somebody
at the phone company in Moorea and Bob gave me their unlisted "customer service" number
which, I'm happy to reveal here, is 56-12-12... A number without the fatal "3"! So I
called 56-12-12..."You're not supposed to call here" They said "You're supposed to call 13"
"I know" I said "But I can't call 13 because it has a 3 in it and my phone won't
dial3's...."We'll come tomorrow" they said. All repair and delivery people in the
world have something in common: they can never tell you exactly at what time
they'll becoming and they always show up during the ten-minute window of opportunity
when you dare to leave your house unattended!...The phone men left a note saying that
"they came but we weren't home so please call again to reschedule a new appointment".

I didn't know "sometimes during the day" was an appointment but I called 56-12-12 again
the next morning... Their phone rang and rang and rang: no answer, no recorded message,
nothing all morning...Determined to get this thing taken care of before the weekend, I
drove to Moorea's main postoffice 25km away, in Temae. There was only one man behind the
counter and a few people already in line. I waited patiently for 15 minutes until I could
tell the man that my phoneline was "en dérangement" (out of order) and that I couldn't
dial numbers with athree in them.

-"You have to call "13" to report it "The man said...

- "I know but I can't dial "13", I just told you I can't dial anything that's got a
"3" in it".

-"Then call 56-12-12", he said, daringly revealing Moorea's best kept secret to
everybody in the post office..

"That's what I've been doing all morning!" I said... "The reason I drove all the way
here is because nobody's answering 56-12-12! ".

-"That's because there's nobody there!" He answered, with implacable logic, pointing
his thumb toward the back room, with a friendly smile...

-"Well, can I, at least, leave a message for them" I said... I must admit that the
guy was really trying to help, in his own kind of way, even if he and I didn't share
the same definition of logic. He gave me a piece of paper and a pen and I left a
message asking the phone men to come to my house as soon as possible... Sometimes, in
Moorea, things happen faster than you expect and by the time I got home, the phone men
were already there! I had been well inspired to leave Jeannie there with a little note
in French explaining the problem...She told me that they had been going around the house,
checking the line and dialing one phone after another,trying new sets they kept bringing
out of their van,and they finally came to the final verdict:

- "Marche pas! (Ain't working!)".

"That's right and that's why we called you!" Said Jeannie trying not to sound too much
like a smart Alec.

-"Let me call the office for advice"Said one of them, and he dialed 56-12-12. Of
course, nobody answered since, as the guy at the office said, "There's nobody there"
... After trying a few other telephone sets, it should have been obvious that the
problem was with the line, not with a faulty phone set...But who was I to explain that
to two phone specialists looking forward to their lunch break...-"We'll be back" they
said... Lunch was over at 2pm: that's when our phone rang again. They were now calling
from some place up or down the line where they were fiddling around with switches,
relays, insulators, and other fascinating phone things...

-"Try now" they said... So I dialed 4 or 5 numbers that had "3" in them...

-"The number you have dialed..." was all I got again each time. I called them back
and said:-"Marche pas!" And we went a few times through the same routine until 3pm,
a time when every self-respecting Government worker in Polynesia calls it a day...

--"We'll come tomorrow with another phone" They said. "It's not the phone" I said
"It's the line"... But who did I think I was?... A telecommunications expert?... Next
morning, they showed up again and, after trying three more sets, they had one that
could dial "3"...I tried my other phone but that one still couldn't dial the
ill-fated number? The two phone men said it was my problem since that set had not
been purchased from the phone company. A quick look at my one and only working phone
revealed that it had discretely been switched to the "pulse" mode to make it work.
It was now getting close to noon on Friday, pretty much the beginning of the weekend
for our local telecommunication experts, and there was no point arguing that this was
no satisfactory way of solving the problem.

Fortunately, the following Monday, the phone men's supervisor was back from vacation
and we got him to come to the house. He checked the line, opened the little box that
connects to the line on the road, and pulled out a few condensers and other phone
gizmos that, he said, were useless. Then he tried and tried again, called here and
there all the way to Papeete's main office,but still: "The number you have dialed"...
The man disappeared and the rest of the days phone men kept calling me from various
places in Moorea and as far away as Faaa, near
Papeete's airport:

-"Try now....

-"Sorry, it still won't dial threes"

By Wednesday I was almost resigned to put up with the old-fashion pulse mode when the
problem disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared. I could dial 3's again, in tone mode
and on both phones. To this day, no explanation has been given to me for this strange
phenomenon. I believe our tupapau had a good laugh on that one.

* In the Tahitian grammar there is no"s" to plural nouns.

I met Jeannie and her husband Jacques while they were shopping in our store in Moorea.
Later to learn Jeannie's mother lived down the street from mine, in Florida. Small
world!!!
Great story Jacques!!! I thought I would die laughing. One time I picked up my
telephone and all I could hear were myna birds..a direct line to nature!!
How long did you have a telephone pole before you had a phone installed?? I had mine
for 2 years. People constantly asked me if I had a telephone when they'd see the pole,
I told them, I think it was installed for the dogs.