Driving through lower income neighborhoods in inner city Cleveland, I’ll occasionally pass by stores with signage indicating that they sell pagers.
Cell phones are nearly ubiquitous in the year 2007, and pay-as-you-go programs make them affordable even amongst the poorest Americans. That being said, why would someone get pager service? Do people really still use pagers?
Drug dealing
How, though?
With cell phones, there is two way communication and the possibility of the call be monitored or the location tracked. Pagers are much more passive. When a regular customer pages, you can call be from a more secure line or use number codes to know what to deliver. It is much harder to track that way.
No, they are absolutely not obsolete. Real estate agents use them all the time, as it is cheaper and simpler than using a cell phone.
The trend lately has been to use text messaging on a cell phone rather than using a dedicated pager but for all intents and purposes it is still a pager.
The use of pagers in drug dealing was a critical plot point of the first season of The Wire, most notably in the episode entitled, “The Pager”. (Wikipedia summary)
I actually have a pager for my work. We are supposed to be “reachable” at all times, but spend all or part of our work hours in areas where cell phones are not allowed for security reasons (e.g., government classified stuff). The pagers we have are acceptable for bringing into those areas because they are receive only.
“Technology’s cyclical!” – Tiny Fey’s pager store owning boyfriend on 30 Rock
I just stopped using one. The reason for using it was to keep my cell phone number completely private. I would give the pager number to people like my answering service. I finally realized that I was going through much ado.
I heard an anecdote once (I don’t remember if it was on-line or IRL) about a guy who was required to carry a pager for his job. The battery ran down annoyingly fast, so he changed his pager message to say, “This is Xxxx Xxxxx. When you’re done with this call, please call my cell phone at XXX-XXXX to tell me to put a battery in my pager.”
One area where pagers are still valued are when you work in a classified area for DoD or other such high classification areas where cell phones are not allowed. Many times pagers are still allowed as they cannot transmitt (I’m sure there are some that can but for the most part your standard issue pager doesn’t transmitt). It is a REAL pain in the ass to have to ditch your cell phone every single day when you get to work. Especially if you have kids in school who may still need to contact you.
And, of course, doctors still use pagers. Pagers can attach to scrubs or a white coat much easier than cell phones (even small ones). They also allow for mass paging (of an entire team, all doctors on call, etc…). I’m sure cell phones have this feature (mass text messaging) but the IT systems in hospitals aren’t something you replace overnight.
They’re still common in the medical field. People who are important enough to be needed are also important enough to be unable to drop what they’re doing to answer a cell call. (This seems applicable in many other professional jobs as well.)
I’ve heard, and I don’t know if it’s accurate, that pagers have a better range than cell phones across multiple kinds of terrain.
Interesting that a pager was trashed on “Mind of Mencia” last season…for those not in the US, this is a comedy program (sorta)…Mencia considers pagers to be in the same category as VHS and cassettes. Obviously pagers do have some limited uses still.
I too can’t have a cellphone at work (maximum security prison) so the pager is quite handy. Since I have to use it there, I insist that my staff use it for all other purposes. That way I respond to the page if/when I want via office or cell phone, when it’s convenient for me, not for them.
There’s a pager in my purse right now. I’m on call for after-hours emergencies in our property management department for the next month. It’s a clunker of an old beast, but it still works, so there are no plans that I know of to change it. We get detailed text messages that the answering service types in and sends.
I prefer the pager to having them call me on my cell phone, actually. I like to read the message, then think about the nature of the call for a few minutes, then respond.
If you are scrubbed in the OR, it’s a lot easier to have a nurse check your pager (fairly static technology) than for them to learn how to negotiate 100 different cell phones. Pagers can also easily be handed off to someone else to cover for you; you might not be willing to do that with your cell phone.
We use pagers in my waferfab. They’re cheaper, we have a text record of the information to check back to, people aren’t distracted by outside calls and we don’t have to hope that someone will check their messages when something needs to be done ASAP. Also, I assume that they don’t affect the equipment they way that a broadcasting device might (Some tools can be sensitive to the two way radios carried by our emergency response personnel.)
When I’m on-call with the Red Cross disaster response team, I carry a pager with me at all times. It is still considered more reliable than a cell phone when you absolutely have to reach someone.
At my last job, I had a pager for IT emergencies (in a hospital). It had two whole lines of LED text, a few alerts, and the ability to receive email. I hated that thing. Who wants to look at washed out black on green? At my new job, we have down system “pagers” that are actually smartphones running Windows Mobile. They have giant LCD screens with games, a web browser, and PuTTY. They can do more things than my actual cell phone. It’s way better this way.
How do pagers work? I know this may seem rediculas to ask but they are before my time.
Do you call a number and it the pager beeps and it tells you who rang you? Can they leave a text msg .ect?