I carried a pager for most of the '90s and into the early 2000s. In the early '90s, I first acquired a pager because it was convenient to queer street activism. Queer Nation zaps were often organized very quickly to respond to events in the headlines. So, we had traditional phone trees to alert members. I was used to that from the Air Force, actually. When we had "recall" drills to simulate emergencies, we used phone trees to alert everyone to get to their emergency duty station ASAP.

But QN found that phone trees often missed people who weren't at home a lot. So we added pagers to the protocol. If mine beeped, I called a phone number set up with automated voicemail rather than an answering machine. This was pretty new tech at the time. The recorded announcement would let people know how to get information about an impending zap.

At the end of the '90s and in the early 2000s, I used pagers for work. Once cell phones got small enough to practically carry, before smartphones, we switched to those. But pagers stayed popular for a while, especially as some of the more cutting-edge pagers gained the capacity to exchange text messages. (Like BlackBerry devices, which were de rigueur for a while as status symbols for business executives.)

I thought about that yesterday when I heard about the Hezbollah pagers blowing up in Lebanon. I wondered what sort of capability those pagers have.

I doubt very much anyone expected one of those capabilities would have been added at a factory in Taiwan, explosives implanted next to the battery to cause an explosion.