Beepers

For a moment in the early nineties, the electronic pager was the it-electronic communication device.  Call it the iPhone of 1991.

Doctors had them.  Drug dealers too.  And that one pathetic suburban homeboy in your middle school? Yep, he had a pager too.  You knew the only person paging him was him mom, and not his homeboys back at the Robert Taylor Homes. 

Pagers, or "Beepa's" as we called them, were memorialized in songs such as N.W.A.'s canonical "Fuck the Police":

Fuckin with me cuz I'm a teenager
With a little bit of gold and a pager

And when we played the dozens (i.e. yo' mama jokes), we knew we could crush our opponent with the following:

Your mama's so fat, when her beeper goes off, people think she's backing up.

Good times.

With the advent of sophisticated cellular technology, the pager was abandoned by most people in favor of cell phones, and now smart-phone (e.g. blackberries and iPhones).

And by most, I mean pretty much everyone but the Ontario (California) Police Department.  In the matter of City of Ontario v. Quon (see Ninth Circuit opinion, cert petition, Adam Liptak's coverage in the New York Times, Emily Bazelon's coverage in Slate) Jeff Quon, a sergeant with the police department, was issued what the court described as "an alphanumeric pager" for job-related communication. 

The police department capped pages at 25,000 characters per month, and required employees to pay out of their own pockets for pages transmitted subsequent to reaching that cap (also known as overage). 

Quon paid overage and used his work-issued pager to send sexually explicit messages to his girlfriend.  Quon sent so many sexually explicit messages and exceeded the allotted character limit to such an extreme degree, that his boss conducted an audit.  Please note that Quon paid for these messages using his own after tax dollars.  Anyway, the sexually explicit messages were discovered. 

Quon sued the P.D., arguing that his boss' review of his text messages constituted unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment.  The case presents many gray areas.  On the one hand the pager was owned and issued by Quon's government employer.  On the other hand, the messages searched were funded by Quon.  The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the case in order to determine whether a government employee has a right to privacy in his pager.

Pagers:  They Still Make You?

Comments

[Numeric Pagers]

Surprisingly, pagers are still used in a lot of places and businesses.

[Cora Bullock]

It's true that pagers were a big hit during the 90s. And it's really surprising to see that they're still being used by doctors and big restaurants today. Using them was really convenient for both customers and the restaurants.

[freelance writing]

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