Pagers, Xers. Pagers.

Posted by Blue_Henri@reddit | GenX | View on Reddit | 40 comments

I rewatched a series from my twenties and pagers are everywhere, not just drug dealers.

The first time I was allowed to have one was my summer job from college while I worked for a university/hospital. I was about 20.

I remember the codes we would send to each other and having to find a payphone within minutes of feeling the buzz. It was cool getting a zap from someone thinking about you, whether work or play. It stayed cool because you could go find a payphone and call back or wait. No one knew what was read and when or where you were; I suppose the cusp of where we are now.

That’s it. Boobs.

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jaxbravesfan@reddit

The only people that had them in high school were the rich kids and drug dealers. I was neither one of those things. I had one during the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college when I worked for as a delivery driver for a produce company delivering to restaurants, so the boss could get ahold of me if he needed me to change my route.

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mrfuckingawesome@reddit

I had two. One for selling drugs and the other was connected to my car alarm. Pretty cool at the time.

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Th1088@reddit

Do you know the importance of a skypager??

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DJErikD@reddit

https://youtu.be/MPZ3cO2zOdQ

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Th1088@reddit

Another classic ode, though Tribe's is still my fave.

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skspoppa733@reddit

I had both personal and work pagers, and looking back on it, it’s clear how dumb personal pagers really were 99% of the time. The work pagers was annoying but at least had some utility, but it was rare for me to get a page from a friend or family that couldn’t have been a voicemail or even an email or IM message since most of us had those available already.

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TheRealScutFarkus@reddit

I remember feeling so badass when I got a work-specific pager and was able to carry 2. No idea why, but it felt nice.

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GogglesPisano@reddit

I worked IT in a healthcare company that required 24/7 support. My team had to rotate taking “on call” on nights and weekends, and the on call person had to wear a pager.

I dreaded that thing going off; seemed like it was always either when I was out to dinner or a movie with my wife or at 3am.

That said, I did get extra pay for taking the on-call time, and it paid for my honeymoon.

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Astronaut6735@reddit

Same for me in IT at a newspaper.

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paintingdusk13@reddit

A good buddy of mine got a job right out of high school tying up big ships at a port. He was on call and had a beeper and a cell phone, which was literally one of those boxes with a corded receiver attached to it. It got lousy anywhere rural. I went to college 2 hours away from where we grew up and he still lived and reception was non existent. Got pages no problem though. He'd hang out drinking, get paged at midnight for a job, get picked up by a coworker from wherever we were and ride in a little boat to get heavy ropes from big container ships and bring them to a clear.

Everyone of my college friends thought he was a drug dealer because he was 18 and had a pager, cell phone, brand new VW Golf and would always get pages at random times and have to leave

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rubysundance@reddit

I bet he was making bank at that job.

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Ray_The_Engineer@reddit

I'm X Ver. 1, so a little too early for a pager. I suppose I could have gotten one as a working professional in the early '90's, but it wasn't really necessary to my job. If I saw a teenager with one, I assumed they were well-off.

My first portable comms device was a Motorola flipphone, some time in the mid '90's.

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rubysundance@reddit

I had a pager for work. My wife and I tried for 2 years to get pregnant. I still remember my pager blowing up when my wife was trying to contact me because she thought she was pregnant. She was so excited when I called her. I told my boss I was gone for the day and rushed home. She was pregnant, my son is now 25 and just got engaged.

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73rd-virgin@reddit

In my world, the only people who had beepers were doctors and drug dealers...which when you think about it, are the same thing.

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sirli00@reddit

What rich mofo actually had a pager? I knew not one soul. We were lucky to be able to afford having the phone connected lol

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RevToy@reddit

I got my first one at 16. The dude selling them didn’t care that I was underage. It was the standard one that was like $50.

Dad got me my second one, a Seiko Receptor. It was a watch with built in pager. High school confiscated regular pagers, but they didn’t know my watch was one. It had predetermined messages like “call the office” which Pop used cause he had a phone number in his home office that was just for work.

High school graduation someone gifted me a green transparent one that slid out of the plastic holster.

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Blue_Henri@reddit (OP)

I just had those black box Motorola guys, but I remember those transparent ones. They were pretty short lived before cell phones became affordable and they disappeared.

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Cowboy_Buddha@reddit

I had one from the late 80s or early 90s, in late 1990s I transitioned to a Nokia 6190 cell phone and never had a pager again.

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Blue_Henri@reddit (OP)

I think they switched us to the Nextel walkie with the boop boop and then someone could start speaking. I remember once being in a county commission meeting and a contractor was on the agenda for a variance or something; let’s say he was forth or fifth on the agenda so he was in the middle of the auditorium-like seating. The boop boop came through which we were all familiar with hearing by that time. Then the voice, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear: “HEY! You still drunk?” Poor guy.

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maddog2271@reddit

The only people I knew who had them were medical people on call and my weed guy.

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cjc4096@reddit

There was a narrow window before affordable mobile (not bag) phones where IT techs carried them. I assume other fields did as well. Medical continued to use pagers for a long time due to telemetry areas restricting cell phone use.

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CompetitivePirate251@reddit

Carried a pager for 10 yrs, pretty much 7/24 … used to get triggered by the fry machine beeping in McDonalds.

When the kids ask about carrying a pager, I just look into the distance and tell them there is nothing to talk about and walk away.

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Beneficial-You3416@reddit

I worked for a pager company. I programmed the pagers. It was pretty easy. We also had a customer counter where people could pay their bill. So many scraggly dollar bills. Once we had a cop turn in like 10 pagers for the reward- like $25 a piece. They were still in the evidence bag. My boss took exception to that.

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ttkciar@reddit

The only time I had a pager, it was for work, in 2008-2009. There was one pager that got passed around from person to person in our department on a weekly basis.

When you had the pager, you didn't just have the pager. You were also responsible for any off-hours problems that cropped up in the company's customer-facing services, day or night, weekday or weekend. It was your responsibility to be near email and/or a phone 24x7. You also had to do the "shit work" tasks that nobody wanted to do, but had to be done.

It was your week of hell, every three months or so. Fuck that pager.

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digawina@reddit

I feel this. I was in IT in the 00s. My team rotated on call weeks and you were on a leash. It was awful and what drove me out of IT. The first few years I at least got extra pay those weeks. But as the team shrank, and the weeks were more frequent, it wasn't worth it.

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adashiel@reddit

I never had one and put off getting a cellphone for quite some time as well. I like being unreachable.

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youngkpepper@reddit

Same. Even when I finally caved and bought one I intentionally left it at home on occasion when I didn’t want to be bothered.
Even now I’m not tethered to it as most of the population seems to be.

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najing_ftw@reddit

All technology is cyclical

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phoenixcyberguy@reddit

In the early 2000s I worked in a tech support role for a really large bank. We had one pager that got automated alerts when a system was down, an on-call pager, and we all had Blackberries on the team.

It was fun times when it was your turn to work the weekend day shift and were on call at the same time. You’d have all three devices and your personal cell phone too. I haven’t thought about that in a long time.

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Apprehensive_Gap1055@reddit

Got one for my kid as a graduation present from Beeper City