Solo Technology

Want to feel old-school and ancient? Go try to buy a pager.

I monitor our production operations, and quite a bit of dev too, with WhatsUp monitoring software. I love it, it does everything I need now and stuff I look forward to figuring out some day.

I used to do all the notification messages via email to phone, but after losing power to the email server or having it crash I soon realized I wasn’t being very smart with that approach. Duh.

So I hung a modem off of the monitoring server (all on battery backup) and figured out how to send SMS messages to my Sprint PCS phone via modem (yes, the phone switch is on battery too!). That wasn’t too terrible, but after a period of time I got a bit tired of being “on call” 24×7 for months on end. Figuring out dial-up SMS with various providers (so other folks could take turns) was a pain, so I decided it was time to go retro and get a simple pager.

I called Verizon — the sales person chuckled when I asked for a pager. I called Sprint and I got the dead silence on the phone. Probably the equivalent of a blank stare as my phone rep sounded about 19. Didn’t get much further with Cingular. Finally, I remembered SkyTel. Hey, they’re still around!

I used to look with envy at the guys with SkyTel 2-way pagers. Boy, I thought that was just the ultimate in accessorizing.

Now, for less a month than it would cost to add SMS to everyone’s phone plan, we have a simple pager. Pagers live for months on one battery. No more worrying about it needing a recharge and missing a call. Pagers are easily handed from person to person — no hassle having to redefine the notification target in the monitoring software, just hand the pager off.

I’ll admit that I may feel a bit silly wearing one on my belt. Don’t think I’ve done that since some time in the mid to late 90s. But it just seems to make the most sense.

Speaking of old-school, I got to setup a bulk email “blast” today to notify 65k+ customers of a privacy policy change. More on that later if I don’t die of embarrassment first…

Leave a Reply