5 ms·

I feel such a sense of kinship for anyone who carries a pager, almost 7 years at my current role doing it. Super cool that dang is among our number :)

by malwrar 10mo ago

geocrasher 10mo ago
Yep, have been on constant "pager duty" for 2+ years, although I have more help now and I get paged 1-3 times a week instead of per night. Still, carry my lappy everywhere I go. Bought an ARM Windows laptop to get that 20hr battery life so I could worry less during my travels. You know, fancy things like going get food or going grocery shopping.
- malwrar 10mo ago
  Rough shift, my worst was every other week and my boss prior to hiring me was 24/7 just like you. I just carry a backpack with a few batteries + my work laptop, fortunately only a few really bad stories but hooooo boy me and that backpack have seen some fun times.
idontwantthis 10mo ago
Do you carry a literal pager? We use the PagerDuty app.
- geocrasher 10mo ago
  My organization is, for now, using OpsGenie. My pager noise: https://www.soundjay.com/transportation/sounds/train-crossing-bell-train-crossing-fast-01.mp3 https://www.soundjay.com/transportation/sounds/train-crossin... That will not only wake the dead, it'll wake me no matter how asleep I am.
  - malwrar 10mo ago
    Haha I made the mistake of using the default iPhone ringtone, now when strangers get called in public my heart rate spikes. Too scared to change it.
  - darkwater 10mo ago
    The "for now" is very important because it will be sunset in 1 year and something. I can recommend you Incident.io or Rootly as alternatives.
- kunwon1 10mo ago
  It may interest you to know that pagers are still a thing, Motorola still makes them, and I know that one major use case is volunteer fire departments I used to work on Motorola Minitor 5 pagers. Looks like they recently released their newest model, the Minitor 7 I wonder if pagers are still used in hospitals? I imagine so
  - sharpshadow 10mo ago
    The AUBMC hospital is definitely using them as well as the paramilitary in that country, at least until recently.
  - sgerenser 10mo ago
    Doctors on call at hospitals also routinely still use pagers. There was a planet money episode on it a couple years ago: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/08/1197955913/doctors-pagers-beepers https://www.npr.org/2023/12/08/1197955913/doctors-pagers-bee...
    - xeonmc 10mo ago
      Do doctors in the Middle East also carry pagers?
  - ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
    There's a company in England called "Cascode" who make firefighter alerters. These are really basic "beeper" pagers, which you can program to have a bunch of different tones and LED patterns based on the RIC and Subcode. I look after several thousand of these across several hundred paging sites. They're relatively inexpensive (70 quid or so in quantity) and they last about six weeks on a commonly-available AA battery. The batteries go flat enough to trigger the "low battery" beep at about 3am, for some reason. I don't know why. There's no messaging involved, although the encoders are capable of sending a text string. The message is "get up and get down to the fire station right now", which generally needs no further explanation. POCSAG is unencrypted, so there would be privacy concerns with sending actual incident information in the clear with it. While we're on the subject of old tech, until BT finally cut the last of them off, we use dialup modems to control the encoders (not dialup internet, just a hundreds-of-miles serial cable) as a backup, and dot-matrix printers to print out a hardcopy message for the crews to pick up. All very low-tech. All very fixable. All stays working if you don't mess with it. https://cascode.co.uk/products/2ar2-and-2ar3/ https://cascode.co.uk/products/2ar2-and-2ar3/
- malwrar 10mo ago
  Oh no, I just always hear it termed that way and it captures the “feeling” for me since it feels like a dedicated device. I just just carry a work phone w/ PagerDuty during my shift.
wkat4242 10mo ago
I wish I could still buy a pager where I live :'(

I feel such a sense of kinship for anyone who carries a pager, almost 7 years at my current role doing it. Super cool that dang is among our number :)

by malwrar 10mo ago

I feel such a sense of kinship for anyone who carries a pager, almost 7 years at my current role doing it. Super cool that dang is among our number :)

geocrasher 10mo ago

Yep, have been on constant "pager duty" for 2+ years, although I have more help now and I get paged 1-3 times a week instead of per night. Still, carry my lappy everywhere I go. Bought an ARM Windows laptop to get that 20hr battery life so I could worry less during my travels. You know, fancy things like going get food or going grocery shopping.

malwrar 10mo ago
Rough shift, my worst was every other week and my boss prior to hiring me was 24/7 just like you. I just carry a backpack with a few batteries + my work laptop, fortunately only a few really bad stories but hooooo boy me and that backpack have seen some fun times.

idontwantthis 10mo ago

Do you carry a literal pager? We use the PagerDuty app.

geocrasher 10mo ago
My organization is, for now, using OpsGenie. My pager noise: https://www.soundjay.com/transportation/sounds/train-crossing-bell-train-crossing-fast-01.mp3 https://www.soundjay.com/transportation/sounds/train-crossin... That will not only wake the dead, it'll wake me no matter how asleep I am.
- malwrar 10mo ago
  Haha I made the mistake of using the default iPhone ringtone, now when strangers get called in public my heart rate spikes. Too scared to change it.
- darkwater 10mo ago
  The "for now" is very important because it will be sunset in 1 year and something. I can recommend you Incident.io or Rootly as alternatives.
kunwon1 10mo ago
It may interest you to know that pagers are still a thing, Motorola still makes them, and I know that one major use case is volunteer fire departments I used to work on Motorola Minitor 5 pagers. Looks like they recently released their newest model, the Minitor 7 I wonder if pagers are still used in hospitals? I imagine so
- sharpshadow 10mo ago
  The AUBMC hospital is definitely using them as well as the paramilitary in that country, at least until recently.
- sgerenser 10mo ago
  Doctors on call at hospitals also routinely still use pagers. There was a planet money episode on it a couple years ago: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/08/1197955913/doctors-pagers-beepers https://www.npr.org/2023/12/08/1197955913/doctors-pagers-bee...
  - xeonmc 10mo ago
    Do doctors in the Middle East also carry pagers?
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
  There's a company in England called "Cascode" who make firefighter alerters. These are really basic "beeper" pagers, which you can program to have a bunch of different tones and LED patterns based on the RIC and Subcode. I look after several thousand of these across several hundred paging sites. They're relatively inexpensive (70 quid or so in quantity) and they last about six weeks on a commonly-available AA battery. The batteries go flat enough to trigger the "low battery" beep at about 3am, for some reason. I don't know why. There's no messaging involved, although the encoders are capable of sending a text string. The message is "get up and get down to the fire station right now", which generally needs no further explanation. POCSAG is unencrypted, so there would be privacy concerns with sending actual incident information in the clear with it. While we're on the subject of old tech, until BT finally cut the last of them off, we use dialup modems to control the encoders (not dialup internet, just a hundreds-of-miles serial cable) as a backup, and dot-matrix printers to print out a hardcopy message for the crews to pick up. All very low-tech. All very fixable. All stays working if you don't mess with it. https://cascode.co.uk/products/2ar2-and-2ar3/ https://cascode.co.uk/products/2ar2-and-2ar3/
malwrar 10mo ago
Oh no, I just always hear it termed that way and it captures the “feeling” for me since it feels like a dedicated device. I just just carry a work phone w/ PagerDuty during my shift.

wkat4242 10mo ago

I wish I could still buy a pager where I live :'(