Before you were ghosted via three dots. Before “delivered” meant anything. Before your phone told you what to feel. There was a pager. A beep. A number. A vibe.
They weren’t really cool, at least not in the way we think of cool now. They were utilitarian. Medical. Sometimes criminal. Sometimes romantic. Sometimes all three.
What’s a pager, you ask?
Small box. Tiny screen. Clipped to your belt or tucked into your waistband. You’d get a number. Or a code. Or sometimes, if you had the fancy kind, a whole sentence. But even the most basic one could say “143” and that was enough. (That’s “I love you,” btw. People used to work for it.)
Doctors had them. Dealers had them. That kid in your class with a divorced dad and frosted tips had one. For a brief stretch of the 90s, so did everyone who wanted to look like they had somewhere else to be.
Does pagers still exist?
Turns out they never really died. Hospitals still use them although the major infrastructure that transmitted the messages nationwide and sometimes further are gone. But when it comes to fashion as always, it comes back around.
Now they’re relics. Props. Tokens from another timeline. You see them in early-90s anime, old Calvin Klein ads, and occasionally on the hip of someone at a warehouse party who hasn’t owned a smartphone since 2017.
Style them with:
- Nylon windbreakers that sound like you’re jogging even when you’re not
- Bleached jeans, fraying in the right places
- A crop top with too many seams
- Big headphones and no music playing
- An attitude that says “I might be reachable, but only by fax or snail mail.
Maybe you don’t need a pager. But maybe you want one. Not for function, but for the function it denies. It doesn’t scroll. It doesn’t vibrate unless someone really needs you. It’s a kind of refusal. A way of saying: I’ll respond on my time.
We’ve got a few in stock, Motorola, 90s, teal plastic, still turns on and even received some cryptic message (probably interference).
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