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Doctors and first responders are among those who still use pagers

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Doctors and first responders are among those who still use pagers
News

News

Doctors and first responders are among those who still use pagers

2024-09-20 14:18 Last Updated At:14:30

The small plastic box that beeped and flashed numbers was a lifeline to Laurie Dove in 1993. Pregnant with her first baby in a house beyond any town in rural Kansas, Dove used the little black device to keep in touch with her husband as he delivered medical supplies. He carried one, too. They had a code.

“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. They resurfaced in tragic form Tuesday when thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in Lebanon, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands in a mysterious, multiday attack as Israel declared a new phase of its war on Hezbollah.

In many photos, blood marks the spot where pagers tend to be clipped — to a belt, in a pocket, near a hand — in graphic reminders of just how intimately people still hold those devices and the links — or vulnerability — they enable.

Then as now — albeit in far smaller numbers — 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. Crowded restaurants use them, too, handing patrons blinking, hockey puck-like contraptions that vibrate when your table is ready.

To those who distrust data collection, pagers are appealing because they have no way to track users.

“A mobile phone at the end of the day is like a computer that you’re carrying around, and a pager has got a fraction of that complexity,” said Bharat Mistry, the UK’s technical director for Trend Micro, a cybersecurity software company. “Nowadays it’s used by people who want to maintain their privacy ... You don’t want to be tracked but you do want to be contactable.”

From the start, people have been ambivalent about pagers and the irksome feeling of being summoned when it's convenient for someone else.

Inventor Al Gross, regarded by some as the “founding father” of wireless communication, patented the pager in 1949 intending to make it available to doctors. But they balked, he said, at the prospect of being on-call 24/7.

“The doctors wanted to have nothing to do with it because it would disturb their golf game or it would disturb the patient,” Gross said in a video made when he received the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. “So it wasn't a success, as I thought it would be when it was first introduced. But that changed later.”

By the 1980s, millions of Americans used pagers, according to reports at the time. The devices were status symbols — belt-clipped signals that a wearer was important enough to be, in effect, on call at a moment's notice. Doctors, lawyers, movie stars and journalists wore them through the 1990s. In 1989, Sir Mix-a-Lot wrote a song about them, rapping: “Beep diddy beep, will I call you maybe.”

By then, pagers also had become associated with drug dealers and schools were cracking down. More than 50 school districts, from San Diego to Syracuse, New York, banned their use in schools, saying they hampered the fight to control drug abuse among teenagers, The New York Times reported in 1988. Michigan prohibited the devices' use in schools statewide.

"How can we expect students to ‘just say no to drugs’ when we allow them to wear the most dominant symbol of the drug trade on their belts,″ James Fleming, associate superintendent for the Dade County Public Schools in Florida, was quoted as saying.

By the mid-90s, there were more than 60 million beepers in use, according to Spok, a communications company.

Dove, who went on to serve as the mayor of Valley Center, Kansas, and become an author, says she and her family use cell phones now. But that means accepting the risk of identity theft. In some ways, she fondly recalls the simplicity of pagers.

“I do worry about that," she says. “But that risk just feels like a part of life now.”

The number of pagers globally is hard to come by. But more than 80% of Spok’s paging business deals with healthcare, with about 750,000 subscribers across large hospital systems, according to Vincent Kelly, CEO of the company.

“When there’s an emergency, their phones don’t always work,” Kelly said, adding that pager signals are often stronger than cell phone signals in hospitals with thick walls or concrete basements. Cell networks are “not engineered to handle every single subscriber trying to call at the same time or send a message at the same time.”

Members of Iran-backed Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border have used pagers to communicate for years. In February, the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, directed Hezbollah members to ditch their cell phones in an effort to dodge what’s believed to be Israel’s sophisticated surveillance on Lebanon’s mobile phone networks.

Tuesday’s attack appeared to be a complex Israeli operation targeting Hezbollah. But the widespread use of pagers in Lebanon meant the detonations cost an enormous number of civilian casualties. They exploded in a moment across the landscape of everyday life — including homes, cars, grocery stores and cafes.

Kelly says first responders and large manufacturers also use pagers. The manufacturers have employees use the devices on factory floors to prevent them from taking photos.

Most medical personnel use combinations of pagers, chat rooms, messaging and other services to communicate with patients without revealing home numbers — an effort to be truly off-duty when they’re not working.

Dr. Christopher Peabody, an emergency physician at San Francisco General Hospital, uses pagers every day — albeit grudgingly. “We’re on a crusade to get rid of pagers, but we’re failing miserably,” said Peabody, who is also director of the UCSF Acute Care Innovation Center.

Peabody said he and others at the hospital tested a new system and “the pager won": The doctors stopped answering the two-way text messages and would only respond to pagers.

In some ways, Peabody understands the resistance. Pagers provide a certain autonomy. In contrast, two-way communication carries the expectation to immediately answer and could provide an avenue for follow-up questions.

The problem, Peabody said, is that paging is one-way communication and providers can’t communicate back and forth through the paging system. The technology, he said, is inefficient. And paging systems are not necessarily secure, a critical issue in an industry that must keep patient information private.

“This has been a culture of medicine for many, many years,” he said, “and the pager is here to stay, most likely.”

Parvini reported from Los Angeles.

An ambulance carrying wounded people whose handheld pager exploded, arrive at the American University hospital in Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

An ambulance carrying wounded people whose handheld pager exploded, arrive at the American University hospital in Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

FILE - Three women hold the pager 'Quix' as they present it at CeBIT '97 in Hannover, Germany, Tuesday March 18, 1997. The beep-beep-beep of a small black box on your belt or in your pocket was something of a status symbol decades before the smartphone wiped it from popular culture. (AP Photo/Fabian Bimmer, File)

FILE - Three women hold the pager 'Quix' as they present it at CeBIT '97 in Hannover, Germany, Tuesday March 18, 1997. The beep-beep-beep of a small black box on your belt or in your pocket was something of a status symbol decades before the smartphone wiped it from popular culture. (AP Photo/Fabian Bimmer, File)

LONDON (AP) — A car-ramming at a Christmas market in Germany, which police are treating as an attack, is the latest in a grim series of events in which vehicles have been used as deadly weapons.

There have been a spate of such attacks over the past decade, some committed by groups but most by individuals. The motives – where they could be established – have varied widely. Some were inspired by Islamic militant groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS, which encouraged followers to carry out low-cost, low-tech attacks with cars and trucks. Others have been linked to mental illness, far-right extremism and online misogyny.

What law-enforcement authorities term “vehicle as a weapon attacks” have reshaped cities around the world, as planners erect concrete barriers around public spaces and build anti-vehicle obstacles into new developments.

Here are some major vehicle attacks:

MAGDEBURG, Germany, Dec. 20. 2024 — At least five people are killed and more than 200 injured when a car slams into a Christmas market in eastern Germany. The suspect, who was arrested, is a 50-year-old doctor originally from Saudi Arabia who had expressed anti-Muslim views and support for the far-right AFD party.

ZHUHAI, China, Nov. 11, 2024 — A 62-year-old driver rams his car into people exercising at a sports complex in southern China, killing 35 people in the country’s deadliest mass slaying in years. Authorities said the perpetrator was upset about his divorce but offered few other details.

LONDON, Ontario, June 6, 2021 — Four members of a Muslim family die when an attacker hits them with a pickup truck while they are out for a walk, in what Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calls “a terrorist attack, motivated by hatred.” White nationalist attacker Nathaniel Veltman was sentenced to life in prison.

TORONTO, April 23, 2018 — A 25-year-old Canadian man, Alek Minassian, drives a rented van into mostly female pedestrians on Yonge St., the main thoroughfare in Toronto, killing 10 people and injuring 16. Minassian told police he belonged to the online “incel” community of sexually frustrated men.

NEW YORK, Oct. 31, 2017 — Sayfullo Saipov, an Islamic extremist from Uzbekistan, drives a pickup truck onto a popular New York City bike path, killing eight.

BARCELONA, Aug. 17, 2017 — A man driving a van slams into people on the Spanish city’s crowded Las Ramblas boulevard, killing 14 and injuring many others. Several members of the same cell carry out a similar vehicle attack in the nearby resort town of Cambrils before they are shot dead by police. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia, Aug. 12, 2017 — During a “Unite the Right” rally, white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. intentionally drives his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring dozens of people.

LONDON: March 22, 2017 — British man Khalid Masood rams an SUV into people on Westminster Bridge, killing four, before stabbing to death a policeman guarding the Houses of Parliament nearby. He is shot dead. June 3, 2017 — three attackers drive a van at pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing people in nearby Borough Market. Eight people are killed and the attackers shot dead by police. June 19, 2017 — Darren Osborne, a man radicalized by far-right ideas, drives a van at worshippers outside a mosque in London’s Finsbury Park area, killing one man and injuring 15 people.

MELBOURNE, Australia, Jan 20, 2017 – Six people are killed and more than 30 injured when a car hits lunchtime crowds at a pedestrian mall in Australia’s second-largest city. Perpetrator James Gargasoulas is found to have been in a state of drug-induced psychosis.

BERLIN, December 19, 2016 — Anis Amri, a rejected asylum-seeker from Tunisia, plows a hijacked truck into a Christmas market in the German capital, killing 13 people and injuring dozens. The attacker is killed days later in a shootout in Italy.

NICE, France, July 14, 2016 — Tunisian-born French resident Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drives a rented truck for more than a mile (almost 2 kilometers) along a packed seaside promenade in the French Riviera resort on the Bastille Day holiday, killing 86 people in the deadliest attack of its kind.

APELDOORN, Netherlands, April 28, 2009 – Former security guard Karst Tates drives a car into parade spectators in an attempt to hit an open-topped bus carrying members of the Dutch royal family. Six people are killed and Tates dies of injuries the next day, leaving his full motive a mystery.

CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina, March 3, 2006 — University of North Carolina graduate Mohammed Taheri-Azar drives an SUV into a crowd at the university, lightly injuring nine people, in a self-professed bid to avenge Muslim deaths overseas.

FILE - Injured people are treated in Barcelona, Spain, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2017 after a white van jumped the sidewalk in the historic Las Ramblas district, crashing into a summer crowd of residents and tourists. (AP Photo/Oriol Duran, File)

FILE - Injured people are treated in Barcelona, Spain, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2017 after a white van jumped the sidewalk in the historic Las Ramblas district, crashing into a summer crowd of residents and tourists. (AP Photo/Oriol Duran, File)

FILE - In this April 23, 2018, file photo, police stand near a damaged van after a van mounted a sidewalk crashing into pedestrians in Toronto. (Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - In this April 23, 2018, file photo, police stand near a damaged van after a van mounted a sidewalk crashing into pedestrians in Toronto. (Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - Forensic officers move the van at Finsbury Park in north London, where a vehicle struck pedestrians in north London Monday, June 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

FILE - Forensic officers move the van at Finsbury Park in north London, where a vehicle struck pedestrians in north London Monday, June 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 20, 2016 file photo the trailer of a truck stands beside destroyed Christmas market huts in Berlin, Germany. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, file)

FILE - In this Dec. 20, 2016 file photo the trailer of a truck stands beside destroyed Christmas market huts in Berlin, Germany. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, file)

FILE - In this July 14, 2016 file photo, authorities investigate a truck after it plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France, killing 86 people. (Sasha Goldsmith via AP, File)

FILE - In this July 14, 2016 file photo, authorities investigate a truck after it plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France, killing 86 people. (Sasha Goldsmith via AP, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, March 22, 2017 file photo, police secure the area on the south side of Westminster Bridge close to the Houses of Parliament in London. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, March 22, 2017 file photo, police secure the area on the south side of Westminster Bridge close to the Houses of Parliament in London. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

FILE - People fly into the air as a vehicle drives into a group of protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017. (Ryan M. Kelly/The Daily Progress via AP, File)

FILE - People fly into the air as a vehicle drives into a group of protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017. (Ryan M. Kelly/The Daily Progress via AP, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 20, 2016 file photo Christmas decoration sticks in the smashed window of the cabin of a truck which ran into a crowded Christmas market Monday evening killing several people in Berlin, Germany. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, file)

FILE - In this Dec. 20, 2016 file photo Christmas decoration sticks in the smashed window of the cabin of a truck which ran into a crowded Christmas market Monday evening killing several people in Berlin, Germany. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, file)

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