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In the 90's, I was a project manager for a software consulting company. I carried a beeper onsite so my superiors could reach me when needed (e.g. to discuss gr
by munchler 3y ago
In the 90's, I was a project manager for a software consulting company. I carried a beeper onsite so my superiors could reach me when needed (e.g. to discuss growing the account). During a lunch meeting one day, two of my bosses at the consulting company suggested that I upgrade to a cell phone, like they had done. I said I was reluctant to do that, because I valued my independence and didn't want to be on a short leash. They both immediately agreed that since they now carried cell phones, their wives called them too often for annoying requests, like stopping to get milk on the way home. I was a bit shocked, because I was talking about them, not my wife, but I didn't say anything more. (I got a cell phone shortly after anyway.)
- ubermonkey 3y agoThere were several years where having BOTH was desirable. Cell service was expensive, and battery life was short, so many folks carried a beeper that was always on, and a phone they turned on if they needed to make a call and had no land line option. I've never understood the "it's a leash" thing. Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.
- cookie_monsta 3y ago> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them. Oh, so you've never had the "why didn't you pick up/ call back/ answer my text/ etc" conversation with your partner? Lucky...
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoNot at our house. We decided early on that the phone was for the owner not everybody else. One of my sons even leaves it in a drawer, takes it out once a day to check.
- bee_rider 3y agoThat’s pretty cool. Your son has a better relationship to technology than a lot of adults. Probably reflects some good parenting, nice work.
- kanbara 3y ago“we” — you mean that you decided for your family, removing agency from other humans
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoI’m having a hard time understanding how allowing each person to use their phone as they please is removing their agency.
- worthless-trash 3y agoIf you can't decide what is better for your kid, maybe you shouldn't be a parent.
- cookie_monsta 3y agoI'm finding that the most stridently-held views on parenting tend to come from non-parents Everybody else seems to accept that it's an endless series of tweaks, adjustments and highly context-specific compromises
- worthless-trash 3y ago> I'm finding that the most stridently-held views on parenting tend to come from non-parents In this case is it the children ?
- op00to 3y agoSure, we have that discussion and I answer and we set clear boundaries.
- armada651 3y ago> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them. Do you though? Because people on the other end will often demand you respond to them if you have your mobile phone with you. This is why people consider it a leash.
- hughesjj 3y agoFuck 'em.
- droopyEyelids 3y agoSeveral of us are not the top dog in our hierarchies and can suffer consequences for telling our superiors to fuck off
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MrVandemar 3y agoGrow a back bone. You can paraphrase "fuck off" in a nice but firm way, which is called setting a boundary. And if you dont' set them yourself, others will set them for you.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoHow do they know if you have the phone if you don’t pick up?
- xattt 3y ago> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them. You are right. However, a ringing phone in the mid-to-late 20th century created a ton of tension and was a movie trope. People felt obligated to respond to what they assumed was a human being on the other end. Obviously, this obligation to respond has been diluted with robodialers and mixed messaging methods.
- wkat4242 3y agoTrue. Conversations were dropped as soon as a phone rang. Mind you, this was also because most people didn't even have a caller ID display or answering machine so if you didn't answer you had no idea who had called. The curiosity factor was strong. These days I don't answer when I don't recognise the number. The expectation of actually catching someone was much lower than these days though. Because of course not being at home meant not being reachable. There's was also this unwritten rule about not calling people too late, which doesn't really happen anymore in my circles since people can now see whether you're active (eg on WhatsApp) and switch their phone on DnD when they sleep anyway.
- supertrope 3y agoEvery communication channel fills with spam. Unless there's a direct disincentive like the cost of a Fedex overnight envelope, or strong moderation marketers/spammers will eventually comprise the majority of volume. Sometimes it's the "content" "creators" themselves who fill the channel with native advertising and clickbait.
- buran77 3y ago> and battery life was short In the mid-'90s and 2000s phone batteries lasted longer than they do today, assuming the regular usage of the day.
- swores 3y agoPretty sure they're talking a few years earlier than mid-90s. Think brick-like phones, not phones that fit in your pockets.
- buran77 3y agoMaybe, it's not out of the question that some would do that but I've never had the feeling it was common or desirable even then. GP referenced the '90s hence my guess. A late '80s Micro TAC, especially with the fat battery, still easily qualified for my previous description. You'd have to go to the early '80s brick phones to get just 1h of talk time from a charge but then again realistically very few people actually talked that much on the mobile in those days when even the networks would have severely limited you. The real sticking point is more that turning off the phone to cut standby time wouldn't have really saved anything for talking time within a day, until you had the time to recharge. I think the worst thing was the memory effect, where instead of conserving battery you'd actively try to drain it when you had the time so you could charge it from 0.
- swores 3y agoOr, rather than worry about draining it to 0 before charging every day like you would a few years later once you wanted your phone to be on all day, you could only turn it on to return beeper messages, thus allowing many days of use before getting to 0 and recharging. That's the time period original commenter was talking about, and why it's different to the mid 90s / early 00s. It wasn't many years that this made sense, but during the early 90s (and I think some of the 80s but not so sure) it was quite common to pair beeper for incoming with phone for outgoing. (At least in the UK, but I don't see why it would've been different somewhere like USA either.)
- mcmoor 3y agoOne of the earliest labor principle is "if you can do it, you'll be forced to do it". Sometimes adding your capability will result in more burden to you instead of less. This is why sometimes it's a good idea to hide the fact that you're good with computer to your family; lest you become their tech support.
- tyingq 3y agoI really liked that the phone was mine, work didn't call me. The pager was for work, and they had to use that to get me to come in for issues. Nice clean separation.
- philwelch 3y agoI have actually enjoyed having both at previous jobs. If you’re oncall and you use your phone to receive oncall pages, you can’t turn it off or turn off notifications or even silence it. Having a separate physical device you can receive pages on keeps you less tied to your phone. If I end up in this situation again I might try and get a cheap burner phone and only install the pager app on it.
- dreamcompiler 3y ago...and some early cell phones couldn't even receive incoming calls so you still had to have a pager. Even after this was fixed it took a few years for incoming calls to work reliably when you were outside your home area.
- throw_pm23 3y agoI had the same thought process in the 90s, and it is the reason why I still don't have a smartphone :)
- stoperaticless 3y agoKeep strong!
- nvy 3y agoIsn't it difficult to exist in modern society without one?
- BobbyTables2 3y agoGetting a mainstream email account is now impossible without one! How far we’ve fallen since the days when usernames were opaque numbers and anonymity was prized.
- lxgr 3y agoI’m aware that Google and some others require phone number verification for account creation these days, but do they actually require a smartphone?
- pjerem 3y agoAlso you really don’t need a Google account to live correctly, especially if you don’t even own a smartphone.
- pjerem 3y agoHonestly if you were able to live without a phone until now, living without Gmail (or what you call a mainstream email) is pretty easy. There are still plenty of email providers left and right that will allows you to subscribe without a phone number. You’ll probably have to pay though. What may be harder in this precise use case is getting a domain name (which is not mandatory but really helpful if you want to be able to switch providers easily) but I’m pretty sure you can still register domains with a landline number.
- mderazon 3y agoEveryone has a boss
- wkat4242 3y agoTo be fair, that is exactly what happens now except most of it is on WhatsApp :)
- dhosek 3y agoThis interview on Fresh Air goes into why pagers have continued to be used in hospitals (tl;dr: cell-phone communication gives a faster turnaround, but the lower barrier to communication means that people will go to the on-call person more often than they would with the beeper where they’re more likely to find their own solution). https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-still-use-pagers https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...
- guenthert 3y agoWell, that article also mentioned the 'other service', i.e. FM, which more readily penetrates buildings and underground facilities and covers wider areas. And if there is a disaster, there's always the danger that remaining cells in the affected area are overcrowded.
- CaptainZapp 3y agoPlus SMS, which was used instead of a pager, is not guaranteed to be delivered while this is not the case with beepers.
- DerekL 3y ago> their wives called them too often for annoying requests, like stopping to get milk on the way home. Wouldn't it be more annoying to get home, and then have to go out again to get the milk? What they probably meant was that they didn't ever want to go to the store themselves and wanted their spouse to do it.