Pagers: The Caveman Days of Text Messaging

We all had pagers back in the day. They were an equal-opportunity technology, owned by drug dealers, whores, doctors and CEOs—and new college students whose parents couldn’t drop the leash. At least there was the code.

Saddled as I was with my beeper, I did what I could to avoid actually picking up the phone. I would carry around a few ROLLS of Quarters: a reminder that when someone paged me, I was supposed to call them back. Most of my paging, however, was sending numerical messages to my Golf Buddies (I was always there for a good TEE Time)

Our Pagers were all Black...it had that official look to it. We were so very cool. This number-to-word conversion we became addicted to will probably go down as only a very minor footnote in turn-of-this-century communication, but, for kids who’d never known from text messaging and hardly used email, the idea that I could send my friends any kind of message and they'd get it instantly—that was pretty darn huge.

Some of our codes were super private so I can’t share them, but others were standard: 411 for information, 911 for emergency, 143 to symbolized the number of letters in each word of the phrase “I love you.”

There was also an accepted system of sending numbers so that, when written together, looked vaguely like letters. We’d grown up getting adults to spell “BOOBLESS” on calculators by typing in the elements of a story about Dolly Parton and then holding the calculator upside down. (Her bra size was 69 and that was 2, 2, 2 big. So, she took 51 diet pills and went to see Dr. X eight times. Now she’s… 55378008.) From there, it was an easy jump to many other words. Hello was 07734. That was one of the easiest one. We said “Hello” a lot. There were so many, it became necessary to have beeper-code dictionaries, or at least, a basic decoder.

Today...we text with our cell phones. I go online with the darn thing and I call friends up whenever I just want to talk instead of messaging people....but I sure do miss the old days when the Pager was the "IN" thing. The simplicity of it all made things fun and adventurous.