At my job I sometimes have to page doctors. Generally, when you call the number there’s a message asking you to enter your phone number (including area code) and then hang up. The number you entered is then sent to the pager, for them to call you back.
I’m not sure how you’d go about sending a specific text message to a pager.
Eh, but it still seems kinda frivolous. If I am too busy to answer my cell phone, I keep it silenced/on vibrate. There is a call log that tells me who called and I can call them back. Isn’t that the same thing?
I’ve owned a few in the past and they’ve all had various procedures. The cheaper ones give you a phone number that you dial and you then enter your number, which is flashed to the pager.
Another one had a bureau where you dictated the message to a worked who then entered it into the system.
The best was a voice recognition method. You’d speak to the computer which would then read your message back. Not bad at all!
tim
At the medical center I work at, our phone book is available via the internal web. You can click a “page” icon and either just enter a call back number, or type in a relatively short text message.
I am on-call for my department a month at a time, once per quarter. This means I could be contacted at any time of the day outside of normal business hours, including weekends and holidays. Similar to what Savannah wrote earlier, my preference is to get a short text message on the pager so that I immediately have some knowledge of the situation before I have to start making calls about it.
The way text to pagers works for my workplace is each person who has a pager is assigned an email address that is specific to their pager. Our email server routes anything sent to that address to the paging company we use, and they transmit it.
I work in a laboratory animal facility. We finally convinced our on-call vet to carry a cell phone last year paid by the facility, but he doesn’t know what to do with it or how to work it to retrieve messages, and it’s never on anyway because he hates it. We pay for the cell phone, but really the only way to reach him promptly and reliably is by pager. He then turns on the cell phone and uses it to call us back!
We also have to page the director of the facility at the end of every day on the weekends or holidays, or when he’s away just to let him know we’ve been there and that everything is a-OK. He’d answer his cell phone if we called, but we prefer the pager because we don’t have to disturb whatever he’s doing or have an actual conversation with him, he can just look, see the “OK” message, end of story. If there was an emergency we’d call his cell.
Wouldn’t a text message to a cell phone work just as well in each of these cases? And then there would only be one piece of hardware to carry around, since each person seems to have a cell phone anyway.
You’d imagine, except he hates the cell phone and won’t leave it turned on. Besides, he can’t (or won’t) figure out how to retrieve messages from his phone.
Also, we wouldn’t have any way to text his phone, since we’re calling from facility land-lines.
There are a lot of people out there for whom retrieving a text message or a voicemail is a very difficult procedure. I love my mom, but she has trouble with retrieving voicemails if there’s no notification popup on her phone to tell her; the one time I showed her how to retrieve a text message, she got a bit frustrated with it. I’m sure she’s not alone in not wanting to deal with the hassle of learning new technology to do the same thing as a pager would.
I used to work for a company that did explosives testing. Mobile phones were not allowed in the field because, in addition to security, they were considered possible detonation initiators. I still don’t understand how a cell phone could cause an explosion, but the “fact” that it can seems to have taken off. Regardless, "No weapons, cameras, or mobile phones in the field lab, is a phrase I’ve seen written on a sign and heard at least ten thousand times.
There are several types. The simplest & most common type is the numeric digital pager. The caller dials your pager number and enters their callback number (or some previously agreed-upon numeric code), which is then sent on to the pager, which beeps and displays it.
Common additional services include voice mail (the pager number allows the caller to leave a voice message, and the pager alert shows a code indicating a voice message was left), voice paging (the voice mail is actually sent to & played by the pager), text messaging (the pager can display alphanumeric messages, which are entered by an operator who answers the pager number, or by the caller on a website or dedicated text paging device), and two-way paging (the pager has a keyboard to type return messages that can be sent to other pagers on the network or to an e-mail address).
And yes, this is increasingly uncommon. I used to work for one of the largest paging companies in the U.S., and got laid off in one of their periodic downsizings. I think they’re the last significant company left in this business, now operating under the name USAMobility. (When I worked there, they were Arch Wireless, MobileComm, MobileMedia … they changed their name every time they filed for bankruptcy or acquired a less troubled company.) The paging industry has really been eclipsed by the wireless phone industry, for pretty obvious reasons.
The really old pagers didn’t do anything besides emitting a loud tone when they were activated. The user was expected to call his answering service to collect any messages.
One advantage of pagers is their power efficiency. They can run for many weeks on a single battery. Cell phones need to be recharged on a regular basis.
A major disadvantage with one-way pagers is lost pages if you spend much time in areas with very poor radio reception.
I just switched within the last year from a digital two-way pager to cell phone only for work (I’m always on call). The pros: I only have to carry one device. The cons: The cell phone only buzzes/vibrates ONCE for a page/text message. No more reminders; I either catch the buzz or, more often, I don’t, and that sucks. Also, the phone is a lot bigger and heavier to carry or attach to my clothing, especially for pajamas or workout gear, and is more fragile when dropped. It’s also a hell of a lot more expensive to replace when it meets a watery death after flopping off my waistband into the toilet.
In my case the big issue is cellular signal reliability. A couple family members in the area have poor cellular coverage at their homes, so when I am visiting them I can’t be certain I’d receive such messages. On the other hand, my understanding about pager signals is they’re stronger, so my pager will get messages even when I am visiting those family members, and I could make my initial call backs by borrowing their land line phones.
Forgot to mention earlier, the pagers at my old job were activated by calling a number and leaving yours, or by emailing pager@xxx.xxx, and leaving an alphanumeric.
Fool around in the “settings” or “message” menus. I’ve had several models that allow me to turn on the reminder. It’s usually in the same menu as your choice of tone, or volume, but not always.
Absolutely. Under certain circumstances pagers are far more useful than a cell phone. For example, my wife uses her pager every day in the schools where she works. The large building with a metal roof prevents her cell phone from working at all and in any case she can’t use the cell in the classroom. Using the phone as a pager would be a poor second since she can’t get a signal in the building. But her supervisor needs to contact her frequently and the pager works. When she sees a page from a certain number, she knows she has to call. Discreet, effective, to the point, and reliable. We find the utility well worth it.
Maybe it’s just a healthy amount of paranoia, but transmitting equipment can affect nearby electronic equipment. I never saw it, but one guy at our plant who used to watch TV in his truck on breaks said that the image was lost whenever he keyed his two-way radio.
An RF transmitter can induce enough current in the wires of an electrical blasting circuit to initiate the detonation of an electrical blasting cap. A cell phone is unlikely to do this, due to limited power. There are safety charts that show the minimum safe distances for various types of radio transmitters and power levels.
I’ve read reports of this happening in mines, where blasting caps were detonated by hand-held radios that were accidentally switched into emergency mode.
I haven’t seen anyone with a pager in over a decade- by the time they became affordable for the average person in NZ, there were cheap cellphones available and everyone said “Why bother with a pager?”
I’ve never seen a pager in Australia- I don’t think you could actually get one, even if you wanted it, without going through specialist channels (ie, you can’t walk into your local Telstra Shop and buy one, AFAIK). Before anyone tries to bust out the Google Fu, I know the “3” network offer pagers, but you’ve got to specially order them through their Head Office.
In short, there’s almost no market for pagers here now, and I doubt there ever really was one to begin with.