History of Besh's Pagers

Pager 0: The Beginning

The reason:

I got my first pager while working as a Sysadmin for CXrL, a research division of the College of Engineering. There were approximately three separate sites where I could be working on machines at any given time, and people needed to be able to find me. Fair enough. I was thus leashed for the first time. I got the basic, no-frills numeric pager, from a local paging service here in Madison, American Paging.

The pager:

I begin my journey into the world of pagers with the Motorola Bravo Classic. A nice, top-display numeric pager. Very basic, allows you to lock messages, and choose between "Annoying-as-hell" beep mode, and the nice subtle vibrate mode. My only complaint with this pager was that it used a physical slide-switch to turn it on and select the alert mode. I had a tendency to bump into walls, chairs, computers, etc, and shut the pager off. Oh well...

Pager 1: Pager envy is an insidious thing

The Reason:

My girlfriend at the time was always concerned about being home to catch phone calls. So, for her birthday I got her a Bravo Classic like mine, except clear plastic instead of black. (Ooooo!) The nice pager salesman at American paging said if she wanted another type, she was free swap for a different model. She did, and got a spiffy Motorola Ultra Express in some kind of rose-marble color. After a few weeks, I became truly envious extended features on the Ultra Express, like an audible alert mode that didn't suck. I went back to the pager store and traded my trusty old Bravo Classic in on a new, black, Ultra Express.

The pager:

The Ultra Express proved to be just as reliable as the Bravo Classic, and even got better reception in some areas. It's a side-display pager, with 16 message slots, 5 different audible alerts, and a nifty holster mechanism. After having used the Bravo Classic for so long, it took a while to get used to having to take the pager out of the holster to read it, instead of just looking at my belt, but the added features like a "Out of Range" indicator, and the ability to set it to automagically turn itself off and on definitely made up for it.

Pager 2: Hot tea is not good for pagers

The Reason:

After I had finally gotten attached to the Ultra Express, I had an unfortunate accident with a hot cup of tea and my pager. I had just prepared a nice cup of Earl Grey, and had set it on the floor next to my chair to steep. As I was letting the Box of Idiot Complacency suck out my neurons, I decided that the pager was too uncomfortable to be wearing now, so I took it off and dropped it next to my chair. But instead of the reassuring "thunk" I was expecting, I head a "sploot!" Dead instantly. I had abused these pagers a lot before, so I was surprised that a cup of steaming hot tea could kill one so quickly. Oh well, back to the pager store... [Picture of a bunch of Ultra Expresses]

The pager:

The people at the pager store were really understanding about my pager's demise, and since it was a rental (Really, the only way to do it) they just swapped me for a new one. Unfortunately they were out of black, so I got a grayish-silver snakeskin kind of thing. (Second one down from the top in the picture. Snazzy, eh?) It was pretty cool, and in all other respects, identical to my previous Ultra Express.

Pager 3: Another job, another pager

The Reason:

I began doing serious "consulting" work for a local ISP, and naturally, they wanted to be able to get a hold of me too. More importantly, I wanted to have the machines I was taking care of be able to scream for help when they needed it. I didn't feel too comfortable letting them use the pager that the UW had bought, so they got me another one. This was my first initiation in Alphanumeric Pagers. Unfortunately, this meant that I was wearing TWO pagers, but getting the UW and the ISP to cooperatively pay for a single pager was impossible.

The pager:

My first alphanumeric pager, the Motorola Memo Express, bears a striking resemblance to the Ultra Express I was still carrying. It was theoretically capable of receiving 120 character messages at one time, but I never was able to make it do more than 80. It has a single line of text, and can either rotate or scroll multi-line messages. Most of the features on the Ultra Express were here too, but the interface had changed, and I found it difficult to use, switching back and forth between the two pagers. The original holster for the Memo Express also lacked protection for the screen, instead holding the pager by it's sides. For most people this is probably OK, but I guess I'm a little more active than some, and I regularly found myself banging and scratching the screen. (They came out with a different holster which solves this problem nicely.) The only other problem with the Memo Express is that it sucked down AAA batteries at a rate of about 1 per month. Compared to the 3+ months I got out of a battery on my previous pagers, this SUCKED. And when it told you the battery was low, it meant it. You had 48 hours to get a new battery, otherwise it just conked out. Sigh.

Pager 4: Pager of the Gods

The Reason:

Having two pagers drove me off the deep end. I couldn't stand having to deal with both of them, and having people constantly ask me how my crack business was doing. So, I finally decided to be the one to consolidate the pagers, and covered the costs by billing extra hours. Both parties were OK with this idea, so back to the pager store I went.

The pager:

I went for the gusto this time, and got the Motorola Advisor Gold. FLX coverage isn't quite available in my area yet, but when it is, I plan on upgrading. This pager is probably too much for most people, but I absolutely LOVE it. It's a four-line, backlit, alphanumeric pager, with an icon-driven user interface, and 8 different audible alerts. I can store 30K of text in it, receive upwards of 400 characters per message, and it's only slightly bigger than the Ultra Express. (OK, so it's spec'd for over 400, but I've never seen over 250. I blame the paging service...) It receives news, weather, and other random crap, and stores the articles in "maildrops" which are separate from the rest of my "real" pages. It also has a "notebook", which allows me to store dozens of pages in a separate folder of sorts. Really, very handy. Fantastic battery life. Great reception. Now only if it ran linux...