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Where Have All the Pagers Gone?
oddRaisin writes "After recently sleeping through a page for work, I decided to change my paging device from my BlackBerry (which is quiet and has a pathetic vibrate mode) to an actual pager. After looking at the websites of Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, I'm left scratching my head and wondering where all the pagers went. I can't find them or any mention of them. Pagers of yore offered some great features that reflected the serious nature of being paged. They were loud. They had good vibrate modes. They continued to alert after a page until you acknowledged them. I didn't have to differentiate between a text from a friend and a page from work. Now that pagers seem to have become passé, what are other people doing to fill this niche? Are some phones better pagers than others? Are there still paging service providers out there?"
I can't stand cell phones, I only got one out of extreme necessity (and because my work stopped using pagers). I like to concentrate - I hate how cell phones immediately "demand" to be picked up. If you don't pick up you've got to listen to some damn message - and you're sitting wondering about the content of the message until you listen to it.
With a pager, someone notified me of their desire to speak to me, I wrap up whatever I'm doing, and I call them. If it's really urgent, they put a 911 at the end and I move a little quicker. I really do miss them... I can't be the only one... right... right?!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Check with your local Hospital geek. Doctors, nurses, social workers, pretty much everyone in a hospital still has one. They are starting to introduce a "cellular phone" into hospitals known by the local docs as a "banana phone" due to its yellow color that indicates its a special super-duper-won't-interfere-with-life-support-machines-phone as opposed to the iKill. But only the most important doctors have them right now, due to the advanced complexity of their magic.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I still have a pair of my good slide rules. One I use, one I have saved for any grandchildren. They don't need batteries, and they're very handy for teaching engineers that the last few digits of their calculator produced numbers are often a bold-faced lie compared to the real world. But they have gotten tough to get.
My voicemail goes something like this:
Voicemail is just a gimmick to get you to use more minutes than you really should, at no expense to the carrier since they don't actually have to connect the call to anyone. It's 100% profit.
moox. for a new generation.
A cell phone is basically a consumer device. A pager was fundamentally a business device. The differences were legion. What I miss most is having a service where the clients were given the number of a human-staffed service and those operators then keyed in the message. Clients were also told that vague messages would get slower responses than specific ones. If they wanted my attention at 9:00 p.m. on a busy night then a "call us" message would leave then sh*t out of luck. They wanted attention, they had to manage to describe coherently and specifically why they needed my attention to an operator who knew neither of us and knew less about computers than the average modern grandma.
"I need him" ."
"Is that what I should write, sir?"
"Um, uh, um, no. Say, um, that, um, it's important."
"So I should say 'call, it's important?'"
"Um, no, um . .
It took only a few iterations to train clients to articulate the issue *before* hitting my number on speeddial.
"The archive server is down."
"Stories sent to blues are getting bounced."
Anybody who has done consulting will understand that this completely changed the dynamic. Among other things, this requirement to specify the problem got rid of a huge percent of the normal degree of blame game b.s. afterwards. It also taught clients that they had to reign in their panic if they wanted me to call. And sometimes by forcing them to define the problem, that act alone got them to fix the frackin' problem themselves and not waste my time at all. When I *did* get a page I could take a few minutes and think through the message and gather my thoughts about my response before having to be on the phone with them.
I'm not a consultant anymore but, gawd, if I were, I just don't know how I would do it without that glorious gatekeeper, the pager.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
My phone has a silent mode and it doesn't go to an answering service if I don't pick it up, it just gets recorded as a missed call.
If you have a problem with cell phones it's because you let it control you rather than vice-versa.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Many do. Maybe not in the US (could be, you seem to know), but in many other countries where there is no such thing as "IN" calls, you just pay the call.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
there's no way to tell from the caller id if it's some annoying luser or somebody you should actually talk to until you answer the call and then it's too late
No, it's not. You're on a mobile phone. You can always start asking "Hello? Hello? Is there anybody? HELLO!" two or three seconds after picking up the call and then hang up. If they call again, do the same thing. How are they to prove that you weren't in an area with bad reception?
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
If you tune in to 930 MHz or so, and hook up a flex decoder, like say, winflex, to your radio's discriminator output, you'll see quite a few businesses still use pagers. Hospitals, car services, banks, big-IT like Ixx, Hx, and the government all send pages out cleartext when their systems are down or offline.
The major hospital where I work is still tied to pagers. They have a well-developed and flexible infrastructure built around them: calling a pager directly, numeric paging, text paging, etc. We like our pagers so much that, when we heard Motorola was discontinuing the model we use, we bought up all the available stock and stashed it away.
That stash won't last forever, though, so the communications guys are testing out replacement technologies, like cellphones and VOIP. They have yet to find something that provides the same kind of flexibility and ubiquitous service.
If you send them frequently, you should consider an unlimited plan. I pay $30/month for unlimited messaging with an AT&T family plan. This includes text, mms, and IM (we don't really do much besides text) Here's how my messaging broke down last month:
My wife - 389
My 17yo - 1958
My 15yo - 11039
My 10yo - 40
Me - 163
13,589 text messages for $30. Less than 1/4 of a cent per message. I'm sure some of those were counted twice, but at that price, I don't really care. That isn't even the highest I've seen. The 15yo has had over 20000 by herself in one month.
Layne
Your 15 year old sounds like one of my wife's co-workers. Check out the math.
1 Month (30 * 24 * 60) = 43200 minutes.
20,000 text averages out to 1 text every 2.16 minutes.
If you take away eight hours out of the day for sleep/activities where they could not text then it translates into 1 text every minute and 26 seconds!
They wonder why kids now have such short attention spans, I'm guessing that it might have to do with the fact that they have to stop what they are doing (on average) every minute or so to send a text. Anyway, I'm sure we all as kids did something that previous generations though was absurd, so I'm not criticizing. I just think its interesting to see what "those crazy kids" do, and it makes you wonder what will be the next latest and greatest thing...
FWIW I'm 26 and hate to text. I do however use them occasionally, but I still prefer to call or email.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.