I’m watching the Seinfeld episode where Elaine is dating a Joel Rifkin (he’s not the murderer). They’re at a NY Giants game and left a ticket for Kramer to pick up, but he forgot his wallet so the ticket guy has the announcer call for Joel Rifkin over the PA. Would a real stadium ever do that in non-emergencies? I imagine now the problem won’t really occur because everyone has cell phones, but this was set in the early to mid 90’s.
They certainly used to page doctors. More recently it seems to be the custom to ask a doctor to leave his name and seat number with an usher or the office so an usher can find him without a page.
“Used to” meaning 1908s and before (I think).
Sure, or at least they used to. Back in college, they’d page people whose children had got lost, or whose relatives had heat exhaustion in the stands, etc…
Once, they paged a “Ben Dover” over the PA in front of 60,000 some-odd people. We all got a laugh out of that.
We’ll, it’s a lot earlier than the '90s, but at a Redskins football game in Washington DC on Dec. 7, 1941, so many naval & military officers were paged to “call your office” that people realized something big was happening. :eek:
I got them to page my friend who had my ticket at Lords during a test match in 1994. It embarrassed the hell out of him and he begged me to never do it again.
My father was paged during a game in Pittsburgh in the 1979 World Series. A very close neighbor had died and her son was flying into Pittsburgh and had to be driven two hours to rural West Virginia to attend her funeral. My dad happened to be at the World Series when he was flying in and my mother wanted him to go to the airport to pick him up. Of course this was before cell phones, so it was the only way my mom could reach him before driving home.
Whoever was responsible for that at the stadium was naturally skeptical as I’m sure every yahoo in the world would want his name announced at the World Series. They actually called the local hospital to confirm that a patient by the name given had passed away. That was good enough so they paged my father. He heard it and when to the information office and called home.
Ha. DIA - Denver International Airport a couple of years ago.
“Bond, James Bond, please pick up a white courtesy phone.”
I’m sure there are guys named James Bond. But it was extra funny because that’s always the way he introduces himself “Bond, James Bond”.
In Germany and other European countries, there was (and actually still is, as I just learned) a system in place by which travellers who can not be contacted otherwise are paged over national and/or regional radio stations to immediately call a telephone number. Oftentimes, they would also announce the traveller’s license plate number so that other drivers could alert him/her.
Usually, these alerts where sent out when a close family member had died. Since mobile phones are so prevalent these days, I guess there isn’t much need anymore for these alerts. You wold usually hear these alerts during the main travel season (in the summer).
Not all that often, I’d think. From about 1975 on, critical/specialist doctors carried pagers when going places where they couldn’t be reached by telephone. Heck, by the early 1980’s, I carried on, and I was merely a computer analyst for a county government.
Everytime I’m at Citifield there is at least one person paged because the keys are in the car/the engine is running
Some places use announcements with fake names as security alerts.
I’d be surprised if it even works when they do try to page people. I work in a business that (while by no means small) is definitely not as large as an arena or an airport, and when we try to page customers because the rest of their group is looking for them / their lights are on / their car has been broken into / they dropped their wallet / their lost 4-year-old is with us crying her eyes out and needs her mommy, it’s at best a 50/50 chance that they’ll actually respond and come to the front of the store to find out why we’re shouting their name over the PA.
My step-brother was paged during a pre-season Chiefs game, to summon him to the security office. Seems the moron who parked next to him thought it’d be a good idea to put his charcoal grill under his car so it wouldn’t get stolen. It blew up the gas tank, and the cars on either side of it burned to a crisp.
I’m not making this up. I was in a WalMart once, and the PA said “We have a Code-22 at the service desk, about 6 years old named Timmy, wearing jeans and a red shirt.” I wasn’t sure whether to expect a lock down, or just an assumption that Timmy’s mom knew what a Code-22 meant. “Oh, no, Timmy’s been Code-22ed again”.
Just don’t call a casino and ask for them to call a doctor over the P.A. as the house doesn’t make doctor calls.
Barry Sonnenfeld was the Not My Job guest on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! a couple of years ago. He told a story about how he attended a concert in 1969 at Madison Square Garden. As Jimi Hendrix was warming up at 2:20am, there was a PA announcement, “Barry Sonnenfeld, call your mother.” Note that he was supposed to be home at 2am.
He rushed to a pay phone to call home, assuming something terrible had happened.
“Who died?” he asked in tears.
His mother replied, “I assumed you did. Why aren’t you home?”
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I’ve seen this happen at a Marlins game. Not the paging part…but I was sitting in the stands watching plumes of black smoke rise up. Turned to my friend (who has a really good sense of direction) and confirmed that it was near where we parked. We were one row over.
No explosion that I’m aware of, but the car in question was burnt out.
</side comment>
I volunteered for a year at a YWCA safe house for women who were domestic violence victims/survivors. In the event of someone potentially violent getting into the building, we had a ““Alice”, please call reception” call that went out over the PA system.
I’ve never heard someone being paged at a stadium event, but did see an announcement displayed on the jumbo screens at a George Thorogood concert once. No idea what it was about, it was just “<name> please contact security personnel.”
Anybody important enough to be paged at a sporting even has a cell phone, and anybody important enough to page them knows the number.
Serendipity déjà vu - I finished reading Palahniuk’s *Choke *two days ago, in which the various fake names stores, hospitals and airports call out on the PA as coded warnings for the staff feature prominently; and I just logged on the Dope after going through my Cracked.com backlog which included an article on the coded announcements at various stores (apparently, if you work at a newspaper and someone’s called to the “proof-reading room”, bad shit is going down). Am I on the Truman Show or something ? 
Back to the OP : can’t say I’ve ever heard announcements for something as trivial myself, but why not ? It’s what the PA system is for, isn’t it ?
I remember hearing “lost kid” announcements twice however, once from each side of the equation : “Little Kevin’s dad is waiting for him at the information booth, will little Kevin please come here or ask any park employee” (which had I been little Kevin, would have meant I would have stayed lost forever because no matter how scared I was I would never have had the guts to actually *talk *to a grown-up. What if I bothered them :eek: ?); and the other one: “Little Kevin is waiting for his dad at the desk, he looks like this and that and wears this and that”.
For that one, I remember thinking that if a kid is too young to even know his own last name and his dad somehow let him wander off, people should probably not be trying so hard to return him to the Obviously Worst Dad in the World. He had one job !