"If I really needed something I would text '9-1-1.' That meant anything from, 'I'm going to labor right now' to 'I really need to get ahold of you,'" she recalls. "It was our version of texting. I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers. It was important."
Beepers and all they symbolized - connection to each other or, in the 1980s, to drugs - went the way of answering machines decades ago when smartphones wiped them from popular culture.
Pagers are used precisely because they are old school. They run on batteries and radio waves, making them impervious to dead zones without WiFi, basements without cell service, hackings and catastrophic network collapses such as those during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Some medical professionals and emergency workers prefer pagers to cell phones or use the devices in combination. They're handy for workers in remote locations, such as oil rigs and mines.
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