Pagers

What's the deal with pagers? I think most people have that thought sometime during medical school. When we get our first pager as a medical student and hear it chirp, we get ridiculously excited - someone wants to talk to us! Inevitably, it's just one of our classmates trying to figure out if they can page correctly.

The pager quickly becomes the heaviest thing we carry. Like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the pager becomes a marker of who we are. While we are at work, it is a tether, a leash we cannot turn off, a link to the hospital at all times. We learn to dread that vibration, to have a reflex of touching our hip whenever anyone's tone goes off.

Anyway, what is it about pagers? Is it an obsolete artifact of days of yore, still in place because of physician reluctance to change? The truth is, I'd very much prefer to do everything by cell phone (though giving out my phone number to all the staff would be worrisome). Furthermore, pagers are really inefficient; to text-page someone, I find a computer, log on to a secure site, send my text page, wait at a phone for them to call me back, and then finally talk to them. In medical school, we had two-way text pagers and that was much better.

Pagers, I suppose, remain in use because they are reliable. In the bowels of the hospital, few phones get reception, but pagers magically remain viable. But because of the inconvenience, the hospital has invested in some "bat phones" - wireless phones that work throughout the hospital, carried by those who need to be immediately available (like the ICU fellow).

Image of pager from Wikipedia shown under Creative Commons Attributions Share-Alike License.