Beepers – useful for some, forgotten by most
Today I got an e-mail in my inbox at work from a swedish company named Minicall that provide a beeper service. They started a new campaign to bring up the benefits of beepers called “Saving lifes is never out of date” (original swedish title “Rädda liv är aldrig omodernt”). Twenty years ago a lot of people used beepers instead of cellphones, today most people barely remember them and much less use them. Yet, these small devices for receiving a phone number or text messages from someone who wants to get in touch with you are lifesavers, literally speaking.
Most people today own a cellphone and use it on a regular basis, some people use only their cellphone and don’t even have a land-line phone at home. In the 90′s most people put their beepers in a box somewhere in the basement or garage, but some people didn’t and these people still use beepers. During a storm, a power outage or other emergency situation cellphones and land-line phones aren’t reliable enough, but the beeper never fails. Every day police force, firemen and hospital personnel use beepers to know when and where they are needed in case of an emergency situation, so literally speaking a beeper can save your life.
Why am I bringing this up on my blog about Linux and open source in enterprise environments? International and internet based companies are dependent on their IT-infrastructure to work 24/7 to provide information to offices all over the world or services for their customers. To meet these requirements you need staff in-house and on-call staff 24/7. In case of a power outage where a whole city turns black land-line phones and cellphone might get knocked out and in this situation you want to call in as much on-call staff you can get, but how? Beep them!
I’m on call at the moment and I carry a beeper everywhere I go, whenever they need me they beep and I can be at home sleeping as usual if everything works fine instead of spending the night at work. I want to remind you all about this great technology that makes beepers the most reliable way to send a message to someone and it’s importance in our every day life, whether we know it or not…