What the Beep?
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Die-Hards Refuse to Let Go of Their Pagers
When Dr. Brittany Bankhead, a trauma surgeon in Lubbock, Texas, got her first pager in 2011, she felt like she was stepping into the big leagues.
“The first day you receive one, it feels like a rite of passage,” she says. “You take it, you look at it, you hold it. You feel like you’re in the movies.”
These days, of course, most people have gone to smartphones. Though she’s had the option of trading in her pager for an app on her phone, Bankhead hasn’t parted with the little beeping box.
“It’s hard to explain to outsiders what it means to be in the paging world and why we have such a love-hate relationship with them,” she says.
Pagers, those pre-cellphone, one-way devices that alert the carrier that someone is trying to reach them, can seem like something out of a time capsule. The nation’s leading paging company, Spok, says it has at least 800,000 pagers in use across the country. The company had 6.6 million pagers in use in 2004.
There are people who just refuse to let their pagers go, including some doctors and bird watchers. They say pagers allow them to separate parts of their life in a way phones don’t, and that the lower-tech one-way communication of a pager is less distracting than looking at a phone full of alerts and apps.
Dick Filby founded Rare Bird Alert in 1991, to share news of sightings via pager around the U.K.
Pagers proved to be a solution to the problem of quickly sharing bird sightings with several people at the same time.
One of the best pages he remembers sending out was in regard to a Long-billed Murrelet, a bird that usually lives in Asia, but had been seen off the Devon coast. A mega alert was sent out on the pagers and people flocked to the area to try to get a glimpse of it.
The company now has a phone app that mimics the pager’s function and can do even more, including showing maps and pictures of birds. But he says some customers still use the pager.
“For many of them, the reason they keep their pagers is because of that separation…it’s the separation of their passion with everything else on their phone,” says Filby.
Rob Lambert, a birder and environmental historian at the University of Nottingham, uses his pager to get up-to-date information about bird sightings in the U.K.
“I literally have an ornithological pacemaker on my body,” he says. “It literally governs where I go every day and certainly on the weekends.” He says his sister has asked him to take it off the dinner table at family meals.
In hospitals, secure text messaging by phones has overtaken the use of pagers, according to a recent study. Some physicians tell horror stories about the insistent, inescapable messaging from pagers.
But Dr. Meredith Barrett, assistant professor of transplant surgery at the University of Michigan, still carries around a bedazzled pager with stick-on sparkly plastic gems.
“You know, I don’t hate pagers,” she says, though a friend told her to say they’re terrible.
She likes the simplicity of the one-way communication, which allows her to process the page before responding and gives her a measure of control.
Bankhead notes that sometimes her pager works in places where her phone doesn’t.
“They’re like the cockroaches of the healthcare system,” she says. “They won’t go away.”
And she appreciates the divide between professional and personal life it provides. Her kids have never heard it go off, because she mostly keeps it in her Jeep when she’s not on call.
Another advantage of the pager? It’s easy for staff to throw one in frustration instead of turning on each other, according to Dr. Colm McCarthy, an orthopedic surgeon in Fall River, Mass.
Tired during a busy on-call night once, he chucked his pager in a closet where it broke.
He gave up his pager when he got his current job, and transitioned over to the apps on his phone. Now, though, when he gets a message on his phone, it’s awkward to answer it, he says. If he’s looking at the phone, he worries patients might wonder what he’s paying attention to while with a pager, it’s obvious it’s work.
He has multiple apps on his phone. Last year, his hospital adopted the fourth app that connects him to patients. When a patient wants to reach him, he gets a message with a phone number. He then has to call that number to get a message with the patient’s phone number.
The mute function on the apps is easily overridden by alerts, so to separate work from home life, he keeps his phone on silent altogether, he says. He often misses messages from family and friends because of that.
He used to complain about his pager, yet now appreciates its ease. “I was constantly ranting about how this is ridiculous that we use technology from the ’80s when we have a computer in our pocket,” he says. “Now that I have that, I’m screaming to get my pager back.”
In one hospital recently, pagers experienced a brief comeback. Monterey, Calif., was hit with heavy wind and rain in March, causing cellphone and electricity outages in the area of Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, according to the safety officer at the hospital, Daniel McKernan.
The solution? On-call medical staff who lived in areas with no cell service due to the storm, received pagers, so they could go home instead of being lodged at the hospital, and be alerted if needed.
“I had a little fun showing my friends that I was carrying this brick around—got a little laugh out of it,” says Andrew Radcliffe, a registered nurse who received a pager.
In the end, there was no need to send a page. But hospital officials are revisiting their emergency plan.
They’re assessing how many more pagers to buy.
Pagers are small, cheap, and most importantly, reliable (as long as the battery was good).
Our group used pagers up until the time I retired.
The person paging you would have to enter the phone call-back number. There was a special "code" for bona-fide emergencies that can't wait. So if I got a call from 708-245-6211-911, the "911" told me not to bother calling back, just get to OB RIGHT AWAY.
I had this type for a while - including the little belt holster.
