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Episode 130: Pagers, PDAs, and Cell Phones

Posted: April 9th, 2013, 8:27 am
by Flack
Episode 130 is Online.

After a slight detour, we’re back with episode 130! In this episode of You Don’t Know Flack I talk about my early experiences with pagers, PDAs, and cell phones. I also talk about the time I almost got killed.

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Episode 130: http://podcast.robohara.com/?p=299
Internet Archive Mirror: https://archive.org/details/YDKF130PagerPDACell
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Re: Episode 130: Pagers, PDAs, and Cell Phones

Posted: April 9th, 2013, 9:53 pm
by Flack
I actually thought this was kind of a throw-away show topic but it's had more traction than I thought it would get on Facebook and twitter.

Re: Episode 130: Pagers, PDAs, and Cell Phones

Posted: April 10th, 2013, 5:13 am
by AArdvark
"Dude, I killed your monkey." Made me spit out my beer! Excellent!



THE
STILL LAUGHING
AARDVARK

Re: Episode 130: Pagers, PDAs, and Cell Phones

Posted: July 27th, 2017, 7:16 pm
by Sumer
Flack wrote:I actually thought this was kind of a throw-away show topic but it's had more traction than I thought it would get on Facebook and twitter.


Flack, I hate to bump this old topic, but I just finished this episode earlier this week. I think you have single-handidly convinced me to get rid of my personal iPhone and get a beeper/pager instead!

Hear me out...

Besides my personal iPhone, I also have a government-issued iPhone. So, I have a cell phone with unlimited minutes, texts, and data being paid for by the government (and, ultimately, YOU, the tax payer!). We are allowed to use the GOV phone for personal uses on occasion, so, in case of emergency, it would be there.

Secondly, my current personal iPhone gets many unwanted calls, even with me being on the DO NOT CALL list.

Thirdly, I just feel the need to DISCONNECT from the friggin' smart phones recently. Everywhere you go, people have their noses in them! Sometimes when they are driving, even.

So that led me to thinking while listening to your podcast to possibly switch over to beeper. I don't want to give out the GOV iPhone number, even to friends, hence my reasoning for the pager. And, most of all, there is a "barrier to entry" with the pager. People who REALLY want to talk to me have to enter their ten digit phone number and hit pound. I can't see these sales calls from my bank, Sirius XM, and mortgage lender taking the time even doing that.

So...what do you think? ;) Besides all that was mentioned, I would save a TON of money as well per month by getting rid of the personal cell too.

Re: Episode 130: Pagers, PDAs, and Cell Phones

Posted: July 28th, 2017, 9:33 am
by Flack
I may be repeating myself here -- I always forget what I said and didn't say on old podcast episodes.

I've never had a government cell phone. Back when I worked on the help desk we had a pager that we rotated around for after hour and weekend emergencies. By the time I became a domain/enterprise admin for the FAA, I/we no longer took direct calls from end users anymore. Occasionally after hours or on the weekend someone from the help desk would call us if something was really wrong with the network (nobody could ping a domain controller, for example).

Apparently there was a difference in opinion years ago between our two main organizations, ATO (air traffic) and AVS (aviation safety, where I worked). All the major IT employees in ATO all got Blackberries (and later iPhones) while all the major IT people in AVS got MiFi devices. Several years ago, IT support for both organizations was combined, but nobody ever addressed the issue and so now half of the people I work with and know have iPhones and the other half (like me) have MiFi devices. That's just fine with me -- if I don't recognize the number calling me there's a 0% chance I will answer the phone, and if it's a number I recognize there's about a 50% chance I will answer (my voicemail message says as much). The FAA is pretty liberal with what people do with their MiFi devices (they all have unlimited data) so I sheepishly admit that I've used it a time or two to stream Netflix (but only while on official travel!).

I've dealt with a lot of shitty things at work, from people who were pissed because they got the wrong pizza to customers at Best Buy who were pissed because their warranty didn't cover "whatever," but the worst thing ever was carrying a pager. I hated it. HATED IT. There were five or six of us that swapped it around and it literally felt like I couldn't go to the bathroom without having it on me, much less leave the house. We were supposed to call the customer back within 5 minutes and I swear there were lonely computer specialists who waited until after hours or weekends just to break things so they would have someone to talk to. If I were just starting out in IT today and had to carry a pager and/or work cell phone after hours, I'm not sure I could deal with it. The only saving grace from those days was that we could literally turn in whatever hours we wanted, and I definitely took my time when working on things over the weekend. The DNS server needs rebooting? That sounds like an hour or two job...