Why wireless? Why not? 2-way pagers keep folks close at hand

By Simson L. Garfinkel
Special to The Seattle Times

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WHY WIRELESS? WHY NOT? — A HE SAID, SHE SAID Pagers keep folks close at hand | Family demands put technology to shame 10 questions to ask before buying

I remember how thrilled I was with my first cellphone. It was a thin Motorola flip-phone, with a battery that lasted for three days and a rate plan that let me talk as much as I wanted after 7 p.m.

I had just started dating this rather hip editorial assistant at a magazine who had a cellphone of her own; I programmed her into the first position on my auto-dialer, and we gabbed for hours.

Anyone who has ever used a cellphone knows they are not just communicators: They are transporters. Chatting on my phone as I walked, the street, cars and other people seemed to fade in importance.

Scientific research has shown that this effect is real and, unfortunately, has resulted in many car accidents. But for a young man in love, it was heavenly.

I ended up marrying the editorial assistant; two years later, we had our first child. But strangely, as my relationship with my wife grew stronger, the cellphone increasingly became a source of interruptions and annoyance. I might be in the middle of a business meeting or trying to figure out how to solve a problem when she would innocently call my phone, asking when I would be home for dinner.

Finally, I started turning the phone off — which frustrated my wife and other callers when I failed to retrieve their messages from voice mail.

What changed everything was the Motorola T900 two-way pager. These are like tiny laptop computers that can send and receive short e-mail messages to each other or over the Internet. My wife can send me a message: "When are you coming home for dinner?" I can tap back my response: "5 p.m.; want me to get anything?"

Unlike a cellphone, the pagers are silent and asynchronous: If I feel the pager vibrate in my pocket while I'm in the middle of a high-powered meeting, I can answer later.

If I'm in a snoozer, I can unobtrusively take the pager out of my pocket, read the message under the table and even tap out a reply.

For a while, I worked at one of those venture-capital-financed start-ups where the executives had RIM BlackBerry pagers; they thought it was groovy the way they could delete messages from their Microsoft Exchange inbox without having to even set foot in the office.

But I like having a mailbox for my pager that is disconnected from regular Internet e-mail: I'll give out my desktop's e-mail address to anybody, but only a few people have the pager's address. If a message comes to my pager, I know it is important and needs my immediate attention.

Don't get me wrong. Most of the messages I send and receive from my pager aren't business at all — they're one-line snippets that I exchange throughout the day with my wife. I tap her messages with gossip, cool things I've seen, jokes and questions that need immediate responses.

Unlike the cellphone, the two-way pager doesn't transport me from where I am. It roots me in place and lets me send out bulletins.

When I went to Disneyland with my daughter last year, I sent my wife more than 100 messages a day, each a one-sentence status report or observation. With no dialing, no phone ringing, no "hellos" and no "goodbyes," these two-way messages felt more like telepathy than phone calls.

Simson Garfinkel is a free-lance writer based in Massachusetts. This fall he plans to return to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to complete his doctorate in computer science.

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