Where Have All the Pagers Gone? 584
oddRaisin writes "After recently sleeping through a page for work, I decided to change my paging device from my BlackBerry (which is quiet and has a pathetic vibrate mode) to an actual pager. After looking at the websites of Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, I'm left scratching my head and wondering where all the pagers went. I can't find them or any mention of them. Pagers of yore offered some great features that reflected the serious nature of being paged. They were loud. They had good vibrate modes. They continued to alert after a page until you acknowledged them. I didn't have to differentiate between a text from a friend and a page from work. Now that pagers seem to have become passé, what are other people doing to fill this niche? Are some phones better pagers than others? Are there still paging service providers out there?"
I've got to say, I agree with this post (Score:5, Interesting)
With a pager, someone notified me of their desire to speak to me, I wrap up whatever I'm doing, and I call them. If it's really urgent, they put a 911 at the end and I move a little quicker. I really do miss them... I can't be the only one... right... right?!
Hospitals. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Slide rules (Score:3, Interesting)
I still have a pair of my good slide rules. One I use, one I have saved for any grandchildren. They don't need batteries, and they're very handy for teaching engineers that the last few digits of their calculator produced numbers are often a bold-faced lie compared to the real world. But they have gotten tough to get.
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:5, Interesting)
My voicemail goes something like this:
Voicemail is just a gimmick to get you to use more minutes than you really should, at no expense to the carrier since they don't actually have to connect the call to anyone. It's 100% profit.
I miss my pager all the time. (Score:5, Interesting)
A cell phone is basically a consumer device. A pager was fundamentally a business device. The differences were legion. What I miss most is having a service where the clients were given the number of a human-staffed service and those operators then keyed in the message. Clients were also told that vague messages would get slower responses than specific ones. If they wanted my attention at 9:00 p.m. on a busy night then a "call us" message would leave then sh*t out of luck. They wanted attention, they had to manage to describe coherently and specifically why they needed my attention to an operator who knew neither of us and knew less about computers than the average modern grandma.
"I need him" ."
"Is that what I should write, sir?"
"Um, uh, um, no. Say, um, that, um, it's important."
"So I should say 'call, it's important?'"
"Um, no, um . .
It took only a few iterations to train clients to articulate the issue *before* hitting my number on speeddial.
"The archive server is down."
"Stories sent to blues are getting bounced."
Anybody who has done consulting will understand that this completely changed the dynamic. Among other things, this requirement to specify the problem got rid of a huge percent of the normal degree of blame game b.s. afterwards. It also taught clients that they had to reign in their panic if they wanted me to call. And sometimes by forcing them to define the problem, that act alone got them to fix the frackin' problem themselves and not waste my time at all. When I *did* get a page I could take a few minutes and think through the message and gather my thoughts about my response before having to be on the phone with them.
I'm not a consultant anymore but, gawd, if I were, I just don't know how I would do it without that glorious gatekeeper, the pager.
Re:Hospitals. (Score:2, Interesting)
I had not realized that I've never actually had to call someone's pager before until my wife went into labor at three in the morning and I had to call the ob-gyn. The pager rang once and then beep! Silence. I'm confused, rattled, sleep deprived; I leave a message (words that will never find human ears) and phone the hospital. Get the switchboard operator to track the guy down.
While my wife's in labor, the ob-gyn actually has the whatsit to pull me aside and spend a solid fifteen minutes showing me how to work a pager. :-/
Incidentally, most of the physicians I work with have iPhones.
Odd (Score:3, Interesting)
My phone has a silent mode and it doesn't go to an answering service if I don't pick it up, it just gets recorded as a missed call.
If you have a problem with cell phones it's because you let it control you rather than vice-versa.
Re:I've got to say, I agree with this post (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes... Problem with Texting is that you have no control over delivery times. A Pager message is guaranteed to be delivered within 5 minutes (at least, here in Holland). SMS and other texting options don't have that guarantee. We tried using sms for relaying snmp alerts outside business hours. It sometimes took 2 hours for us to be notified that a servers was down. So we took the pager back in service.
Re:I miss my pager all the time. (Score:5, Interesting)
Truth is, I've been planning to get one of those Voyager-type phones with the less tiny QWERTY keyboard sometime in about a month. Or maybe a Nokia N810. Or iPhone. Last month I bought an HP 2133. Add to that my internet phone and I'm *hoping* that some time this spring I'll be able to build some interlocking system using all three that manages to do an almost passable job of providing the kind of gatekeeper and message pre-sorter functions that I took for granted long about '95.
One of my oldest friends and I periodically argue about this kind of thing and I've long been saying that we're going to see the return of the human secretary. My friend used to argue fiercely for technological fixes like agents and groupware but as the years pass he's coming around.
Personally I think that much of what we're talking about here is about judgement. And in a world of accelerating change, there will always be a lag for entrepreneurs in trying to make any expert system understand the nuances that a typical fifties secretary could handle just fine before her coffee with half of her attention. Some of this will probably be outsourced to people in places like India but I'm betting that groups like physically disabled workers or those looking for telecommuting options right here in the developed world will work out just fine for most of us who really need it.
Frankly, I don't know about y'all but I'm trying out a new assistant on Wednesday. I've been a geek for going on thirty years and afaic some jobs are just not best addressed with technology.
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:5, Interesting)
Many do. Maybe not in the US (could be, you seem to know), but in many other countries where there is no such thing as "IN" calls, you just pay the call.
Obvious solution (Score:3, Interesting)
there's no way to tell from the caller id if it's some annoying luser or somebody you should actually talk to until you answer the call and then it's too late
No, it's not. You're on a mobile phone. You can always start asking "Hello? Hello? Is there anybody? HELLO!" two or three seconds after picking up the call and then hang up. If they call again, do the same thing. How are they to prove that you weren't in an area with bad reception?
Tune in to 930 MHz and see all the pager traffic (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Pagers are great (Score:4, Interesting)
The major hospital where I work is still tied to pagers. They have a well-developed and flexible infrastructure built around them: calling a pager directly, numeric paging, text paging, etc. We like our pagers so much that, when we heard Motorola was discontinuing the model we use, we bought up all the available stock and stashed it away.
That stash won't last forever, though, so the communications guys are testing out replacement technologies, like cellphones and VOIP. They have yet to find something that provides the same kind of flexibility and ubiquitous service.
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you send them frequently, you should consider an unlimited plan. I pay $30/month for unlimited messaging with an AT&T family plan. This includes text, mms, and IM (we don't really do much besides text) Here's how my messaging broke down last month:
My wife - 389
My 17yo - 1958
My 15yo - 11039
My 10yo - 40
Me - 163
13,589 text messages for $30. Less than 1/4 of a cent per message. I'm sure some of those were counted twice, but at that price, I don't really care. That isn't even the highest I've seen. The 15yo has had over 20000 by herself in one month.
Layne
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:4, Interesting)
1 Month (30 * 24 * 60) = 43200 minutes.
20,000 text averages out to 1 text every 2.16 minutes.
If you take away eight hours out of the day for sleep/activities where they could not text then it translates into 1 text every minute and 26 seconds!
They wonder why kids now have such short attention spans, I'm guessing that it might have to do with the fact that they have to stop what they are doing (on average) every minute or so to send a text. Anyway, I'm sure we all as kids did something that previous generations though was absurd, so I'm not criticizing. I just think its interesting to see what "those crazy kids" do, and it makes you wonder what will be the next latest and greatest thing...
FWIW I'm 26 and hate to text. I do however use them occasionally, but I still prefer to call or email.
Re:Hospitals. (Score:2, Interesting)
Hello from the random Hospital geek!
We actually have a mix of pagers, IP phones and Blackberries, as we cant buy new pagers anymore. In a hospital context the internal paging system is useless as you can only page someone an internal phone number (which is no good as theres no way of prioritising the message.) Where as the mobile phones of the crash team all ring with the location when a crash is called, and non urgent stuff is handled by emails/the IP phones (some of which are wireless.)
Most modern hospital gear is very well shielded against interference, and anyway the PETRA radios carried by paramedics are more likely to cause damage, so our hospitals rule is its fine, as long as you move away from any equipment to answer calls.
Re:Hospitals. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, Hospitals are probably the biggest customer of paging companies. Most hospitals have in-house repeaters for better coverage than a cellphone. Especially in the underground morgue in the basement.
You are also likely to have better coverage in and around larger cities ensuring you receive the page (a must for medical professionals) and some technologies will resend pages if the device does not confirm receipt.
Check out http://www.usamobility.com/ [usamobility.com]
As for "banana" phones... (please, don't start singing that damned song!) it depends on the facility I guess. Once the infrastructure is in place in a hospital, it's about as expensive as a high-end PBX desk phone so restricting it to a few important doctors just isn't required.
I work at a Hospital that uses "spectralink" phones - also called banana phones or bat phones depending on the yellow or black case it's in. They are a strictly in-house addition to the PBX system (you may be able to get a signal up to a few hundred feet outside the building, but that's it) and do not interfere with life support systems, wifi, etc.
I doubt any doctors actually have their own, it's mostly administration, management and other key people around the facility. Most departments will have a few "spares" which are rotated around with the staff... So you can always reach the in-house anesthesiologist on call by dialing a given number - but it could be any one of several people who answer depending on who's working that day.
If you need a specific doctor, you just page them.