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Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Have a Pager? Do You Find It Useful?
New submitter Chance Callahan writes: I am starting a business, helping a friend with his own startup, and volunteering regularly with a major political campaign (#feelthebern). One thing I have noticed is that my phone likes to die at the most inconvenient times and leaves me out of touch with people. With the business I'm starting requiring clients to be able to get ahold me quickly, I have been seriously considering getting a two-way pager. It's much easier swap out a AA battery once a month then to worry "will client X be able to get ahold me in the event of an emergency?" So, Slashdot, the million dollar question is, in the age of cell phones, do you have a pager? Do you still find it useful? Do any other "dead-tech" tools still play a big role for your communications? For example, fax machines are still big in Japan, and a lot of people keep landlines, too.
Why not buy one of those easy-to-find extra battery USB-charger things and carry that with you instead?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Where I work in downtown Seattle, cell coverage doesn't work at all below ground or in our office building if you're not near a window. We have to still use pagers.
A phone cannot be carried into a secure area. A (one-way) pager can.
Not sure how you manage to have a phone with less than a half day of life.
My guess is that the OP is like a former boss of mine who would complain constantly about the shitty battery life of new phones yet would never charge his phone until it shut itself off because the battery ran low.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
SMS can take hours to deliver messages in a downtown area. I work for a data center, and I typically receive an email and can fix the problem before I even get the SMS alert. Nothing beats a pager when it comes to reliability and speed of delivery.
One of my friends carries a pager when he's on call for work (a municipality, and he'd most likely be contacted about a toxic spill). He just clips it to his belt and forgets about it.
The pager has several advantages over a phone. The most critical is that it's a shared device that gets passed between the on-call staff. That means there's no risk of someone forgetting their phone at home, running out of battery or having an incorrect number listed on the staff contact form. Emergency Services has a single contact number that should always work.
True, and so 0.0001% of the population will benefit from this.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...