When I was in grad school, I had a pager. It was a cheap little Motorola thing, which if memory serves was free with something like ten Mountain Dew bottle labels (which I could easily produce in, like, an evening) and it was meant to be the key to some sort of promotional program. As it happens, it was also keyed to the local area (as most such devices were at the time) and was no good outside of Nashville. I didn’t give the number to my then-girlfriend, because the last thing I needed was for her to be able to ping me anywhere, but I didn’t really have anyone else to give the number, either.
I mention this because I’m still keeping Tuesday night as shutdown night – turn off the laptop, put away the iPhone, switch off the wireless on the Kindle, and limit myself to whatever’s on TV or what’s in a book or magazine or (gasp) actually go out and do something. And for those nights, I have my backup phone and my Google Voice number, which only a couple of people have so that I can be reached in an emergency. And the thought went through my mind last night that an actual pager would be a handy thing to have for such evenings – nothing even that complicated, just numeric paging and maybe voice mail. And then it occurred to me that while the old black plastic Dew Beep pager was nice, it might be even nicer to have one of the sleeker translucent-colored-plastic Motorola models from later in the 90s, or the elusive one-line-text Motorola Jazz…
And then I look at my Moto F3, or my Nokia 1112, and it occurs to me that there are things I used to covet which I still DO covet, despite the presence of technology that’s far in advance of them which I already possess. I mean, with an iPhone 4, there’s very little need for a Sony Ericsson K710. And the iPhone will run freakin’ rings around any old Blackberry-style keyboarded device like the $100-ish Nokia I was looking at for an emergency iPhone replacement when I thought my wife had lost hers. And hell, the iPhone pummels the old second-gen metal-case iPod Nano (or the original gold-metal iPod Mini). But I still would jump at the chance to grab either of them.
Actually, now that I think about it, there are bits of me that still perk up at the notion of the PowerBook 1400, the first “low-end” PowerPC-based portable Mac (which replaced the nightmare-inducing PowerBook 5300 series). Or the shiny silver Siemens S40 phone that I saw in a Cingular shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto, in June 2002, which really tripped my “I must get to GSM as quickly as possible” urge. Which in turn points my mind back to PowerTel, in the days when GSM was wildly new and unheard of – the notion that you could pop this credit-card out of your phone and put it in ANOTHER phone and carry right on? MADNESS.
Maybe this is what passes for a mid-life crisis for me. Other guys run out and get hair plugs, motorcycles and Hooters waitresses – yer boy slumps in his chair and covets a pager.