Pagers

So you just walked out of the latest New Kids on the Block [Pearl Jam, Will Smith, Alanis Morrissette…] concert, mabey sucking down some tang, rushing home to try to catch that last episode of Baywatch, when all of a sudden the car is filled with a piercing screech. No nothing is wrong with the car, turns out; the coolest kid not on TRL just got a page.

That’s right, the Jeopardy of electronic devices, spitting out a phone number you must call. Or, if you were unlucky enough to have an alpha-numeric pager (latin for too gay to function) you may have even gotten some coded message only someone with an advanced degree in cryptology can decipher. If only you were in the 5 square feet that the somehow less practical car phone worked you could call the number on that. Now however you have to pull over, find a payphone, and return said call. What’s more, the number sent to you nine times out of ten fell into one of two categories:

a) A wrong number was dialed somewhere along the way, because let’s be honest, these new non-rotary phones are just so hard to use. More often than not this results in two to three calls to the wrong number trying to confirm if you were given a wrong number or dialed a wrong number and about $6 in payphone charges. Or,

b) A kind friend, knowing you have little else to do aside from wear a little box on your belt all day and wait for people to waste your time, has paged you with the number to the Chinese food restaurant 2 states away making sure you spend a good 30 minutes and as many quarters, dimes and, nickels on the phone trying to figure out why you were paged by someone who only seems to care if you want General Tso’s Chicken or Mongolian Beef.

Either way you’re a loser.