So, me an’ mr emilyforce, we’re too poor to get us some cellphones. But it would be really nice for us to be able to page each other. We were able to do this when we lived in a smallish city (where home and all the places we worked were within a mile and a half of each other) with a set of those Family Radio walkie-talkie thingies. Now I work about 10 miles away from home and about 12 miles away from where he works.
I’ve never owned a pager and neither has he. They scare me – there’s a Pinky’s Pager a few blocks away from home, which is in fact painted hot pink, with more tacky signage on it than all the billboards from here to San Antonio combined. If I’m gonna go shopping around for a couple of pagers, I want to know what I’m getting into.
What are the low-end pager options these days? What features are most useful? What’s a reasonable monthly service fee? What are good companies to go with? How does all this work anyway? I’m pretty good at losing things, but mr emilyforce faaaar outshines me in this skill, so tell me – can you just buy replacements? How does that work? Does the service gouge you on replacements?
Any and all advice and/or anecdotes amply appreciated.
Well, I loathe and despise having a pager but must for work, so I can give you some (biased) feedback.
The pager I had the longest (believe it or not, over 5 years without losing it, even though I misplaced it tons of times) was through MobileComm (perhaps they are a local service only, I don’t know). It cost $236/yr, but I am quite sure there are likely cheaper ones. Do be careful, though, of places which offer a great initial rate then jack it up after a few months, or base their rates on how much it gets used.
This one had 2 options—callers could either enter their phone number while my outgoing message was playing (in which case, their number would appear on the screen), or they could wait for the message to end and leave a voicemail (in which case, my pager number would appear, telling me I needed to call in and get a message.)
Now, this is both convenient and inconvenient. I have to call in and listen to every voicemail, because there’s no way of knowing if it’s an emergency or someone calling to wish me a good weekend (No, that never really happens…) If you use the numeric system only, you can have codes—phone number + 411 means I need information, phone number + 911 means an emergency, etc.
BUT, you do have to find or be near a phone, and I guess the question is how possible that is, whether you’d be racking up calling card charges, etc.
I think that’s all the expertise I can offer at this point…
There’s a system here in NY called Pager-for-Life. You pay $50 to activate a pager, and that’s it. It’s going to work forever.
In theory, that is.
What this company did is they bought a whole bandwith, and they run their pagers on that. But after buying a whole bandwith, how much money do you think they had for towers?
I’ll tell you. They had money for one tower. So the pager only works within that one neighborhood in New York.
So, if anyone is out there, where you live, advertising a deal similar to Pager-for-Life, I would warn you to avoid it.