The small plastic box that beeped and flashed numbers was a lifeline to Laurie Dove in 1993.Pregnant with her first baby in a house beyond any town in rural Kansas, Dove used the little black device to keep in touch with her husband as he delivered medical supplies.He carried one too.
They had a code.“If I really needed something I would text ‘9-1-1.’ That meant anything from, ‘I’m going to labor right now’ to ‘I really need to get ahold of you,’” she recalls.“It was our version of texting.I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers.
It was important.” Beepers and all they symbolized — connection to each other or, in the 1980s, to drugs — went the way of answering machines decades ago when smartphones wiped them from popular culture.They resurfaced in tragic form Tuesday when thousands of sabotaged pagers exploded simultaneously in Lebanon, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands in a mysterious, multi-day attack as Israel declared a new phase of its war on Hezbollah.In many photos, blood marks the spot where pagers tend to be clipped — to a belt, in a pocket, near a hand — in graphic reminders of just how intimately people still hold those devices and the links — or vulnerability — they enable.Then as now — albeit in far smaller numbers — pagers are used precisely because they are old school.
They run on batteries and radio waves, making them impervious to dead zones without WiFi, basements without cell service, hackings and catastrophic network collapses such as those during the Sept.11, 2001, attacks.To those who distrust data collection, pagers are appealing because they have no way to track users.From the start, people have been ambivalent about pagers and the irksome feeling of being summoned when it's convenient for someone else.
“The doctors wanted to have nothing to do with it because it would disturb their golf game or it would disturb the patient,” Gross said in a video made when he received the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.“So it wasn't a success, as I thought it would be when it was first introduced.But that changed later.”By the 1980s, millions of Americans used pagers, according to reports at the time.
The devices were status symbols — belt-clipped signals that a wearer was important enough to be, in effect, on call at a moment's notice.Doctors, lawyers, movie stars and journalists wore them through the 1990s.In 1989, Sir Mix-a-Lot wrote a song about them, rapping: “Beep diddy beep, will I call you maybe.”"How can we expect students to ‘just say no to drugs’ when we allow them to wear the most dominant symbol of the drug trade on their belts,″ James Fleming, associate superintendent for the Dade County Public Schools in Florida, was quoted as saying.
“I do worry about that," she says.“But that risk just feels like a part of life now.”“When there’s an emergency, their phones don’t always work,” Kelly said, adding that pager signals are often stronger than cell phone signals in hospitals with thick walls or concrete basements.Cell networks are “not engineered to handle every single subscriber trying to call at the same time or send a message at the same time.”Kelly says first responders and large manufacturers also use pagers.
The manufacturers have employees use the devices on factory floors to prevent them from taking photos.Dr.Christopher Peabody, an emergency physician at San Francisco General Hospital, uses pagers every day — albeit grudgingly.
“We’re on a crusade to get rid of pagers, but we’re failing miserably,” said Peabody, who is also director of the UCSF Acute Care Innovation Center.Peabody said he and others at the hospital tested a new system and “the pager won": The doctors stopped answering the two-way text messages and would only respond to pagers.“This has been a culture of medicine for many, many years,” he said, “and the pager is here to stay, most likely.”____Parvini reported from Los Angeles.
