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?"

Comments

I've got to say, I agree with this post

[religious freak]

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?!

Re:I've got to say, I agree with this post

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... Problem with Texting is that you have no control over delivery times. A Pager message is guaranteed to be delivered within 5 minutes (at least, here in Holland). SMS and other texting options don't have that guarantee. We tried using sms for relaying snmp alerts outside business hours. It sometimes took 2 hours for us to be notified that a servers was down. So we took the pager back in service.

Hospitals.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

Re:Try YouMail...

[Hadlock]

My voicemail goes something like this:

You have reached Hadlock. If you need to leave a message, please hang up and send me a text message or email. Thank you." I've never checked my voicemail. If it's a personal call, they'll text message me. If it's business, they have my email address. Since it's a personal phone line it's mostly text messages.

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.

I miss my pager all the time.

[RustinHWright]

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.

Re:I miss my pager all the time.

[RustinHWright]

Truth is, I've been planning to get one of those Voyager-type phones with the less tiny QWERTY keyboard sometime in about a month. Or maybe a Nokia N810. Or iPhone. Last month I bought an HP 2133. Add to that my internet phone and I'm *hoping* that some time this spring I'll be able to build some interlocking system using all three that manages to do an almost passable job of providing the kind of gatekeeper and message pre-sorter functions that I took for granted long about '95.

One of my oldest friends and I periodically argue about this kind of thing and I've long been saying that we're going to see the return of the human secretary. My friend used to argue fiercely for technological fixes like agents and groupware but as the years pass he's coming around.

Personally I think that much of what we're talking about here is about judgement. And in a world of accelerating change, there will always be a lag for entrepreneurs in trying to make any expert system understand the nuances that a typical fifties secretary could handle just fine before her coffee with half of her attention. Some of this will probably be outsourced to people in places like India but I'm betting that groups like physically disabled workers or those looking for telecommuting options right here in the developed world will work out just fine for most of us who really need it.

Frankly, I don't know about y'all but I'm trying out a new assistant on Wednesday. I've been a geek for going on thirty years and afaic some jobs are just not best addressed with technology.

Re:Try YouMail...

[morie]

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.