Stuck in the Pager Age

Anyone who knows me knows that I do not like cellular phones. In fact, I despise them and refuse to own one. Indeed, I am not fond of any form of telephony, whether it be cellular, landline, or tin-can-and-string. I'm still stuck in the pager age.

 Things used to be so simple. I'd have a small, sleek Motorola pager fashionably clipped to the bill of my baseball cap, which was used to field messages from my innumerable female suitors, and a large unwieldy alphanumeric pager clipped to my belt which kept me abreast of the latest baseball scores and constantly threatened to pull my pants down, exposing the fact that I was wearing Christmas-themed silk boxers in the middle of July, Saint Nicholas' jolly face adorning my loins.

Before cell phones took over, anyone who was anyone owned a pager. When your pager beeped, you'd glance at the tiny screen and mumble to yourself "I'll call her a little later". With cell phones, things are different. The caller is not looking to speak to you eventually, they want to talk to you right now.

With pagers, one always had an adequate excuse for not responding promptly. "I was out and wasn't near a phone" was far and away the most common justification for not getting back to the person who had sent the page, and although this explanation was always accepted with a grain of salt, skeptics found it difficult to argue against because it could very well have been true. Another popular excuse was "I didn't have enough change to use a payphone", and one could always believably claim that they simply had never received the initial page because their beeper's battery had died, as they so often did.

Cell phones changed all that. Indeed, cell phones have made filthy damned liars of us all.

When attempting to avoid a call, the mobile phone owner must constantly resort to making increasingly ludicrous excuses. "I wasn't near a phone" doesn't cut it anymore because yes you were, it was right there in your goddamn pocket. This problem is being persistently exacerbated by rapid advancements in technology. Battery life has reached unprecedented levels. Reception can be found in the most remote of regions. The supply of viable excuses for not answering a call is rapidly dwindling. The excuse "I was too busy answer" is inconsistent with what we know about the American work ethic.  Nowadays, the call-avoider must concoct a complex confabulation to evade answering. "I accidentally dropped my iPhone in a pelican's mouth and had to chase it up and down the beach for hours" they will say when you confront them about unanswered calls. "I had a dominatrix over and she tied me up and hung me from a meathook for several hours, so I didn't have a free hand to answer the phone," they might explain the next day.

One of the most charming aspects of pager patronage was the use of that incomprehensible cipher known as pager code. Before pagers were rendered obsolete by the rise of cellular phones and the advent of SMS text messaging, people would write to each other using a strange language in which numbers represented the letters they most closely resembled. Since there are only ten distinct numbers and twenty-six letters in the English language, this called for some ingenuity in filling in the gaps. The letters E and F were both represented by the number 3, and the number 7 covered letters J, L, and T. N was 17 and M was 177. U and V were both 11, and W was 111. X was rather inexplicably the number 22. This made deciphering the simplest of messages a puzzling and troublesome experience. Receiving a page such as "7375 311515 8684" required in upwards of an hour of deep thought to decode, and by the time you realized it was an invitation to engage in no-strings-attached intercourse, the offer may have already expired.

Since the average American's spelling is horrendous, knowing which letters the numbers corresponded to was only half the battle in deciphering the meaning of a page. To make matters worse, while most messages were meant to be read right-side-up, the occasional message was meant to be read upside-down, like typing "hell" or "boobs" on a calculator. And there was usually no telling which one a message would be until you began to crack the code. You might spend twenty minutes mulling over the meaning of "07734" before rotating your pager and realizing it was a simple greeting. Gleaning the meaning of some messages was simply a matter of esoteric knowledge. One was just expected to know that "143" means "I love you" and "609" means "I'm so fucking pissed off at you right now" (a message I received frequently).

Typing in pager code on a touch-tone phone was such a laborious and painstaking procedure that it lent additional gravity to the words one was attempting to send. The sender could not afford to mince words lest the recipient of the message find themselves unable to unscramble the code. SMS messaging has made communicating by text too easy and has thusly depreciated the value of the average message. Cell phone owners send messages at prodigious rates now that they are able to employ the entire alphabet, yet these messages are largely uninteresting and uninspired and often sent haphazardly and in haste. In the past, receiving a message in pager code was a thrilling moment that would rouse excitement in the recipient and send his or her mind to the races; nowadays, receiving a text message on a cellular phone is unremarkable and commonplace.

I for one would like to see the return of widespread pager usage. I fantasize about reliving those cherished moments in which my little Motorola would play a few strains of Pachelbel's Canon and I would spend the next forty minutes trying to decode a message from a coquettish harlot wishing to lay with me, in the biblical-meaning kind of way. And I dream of a day when I can once again shrug my shoulders at someone and say "I'm sorry, but I didn't have the twenty-five cents to call you back."