This is planet money from NPR.
For a lot of young doctors starting out their careers, there comes this special moment when you start to feel like a real person of medicine.
This rite of passage happens after youve graduated from medical school, when you start working in a hospital and they hand you this thing, its almost like a historical artifact.
So its a little black box with a little gray screen in it, and it emits a sound to alert you that you have a message.
Mary Mercer is an emergency room doctor in California.
And yes, she is talking about the pager.
Can you just help me understand, what is this sound?
So it's like something like that.
Oh, my gosh.
Mary got her first pager when she started her residency training in 2007.
She says, the sound of your first pager, it gets seared into your soul.
The ba ba ba goes off.
A number pops up on your pager screen, and you race to find a phone to call that number back.
To this day, at a lot of hospitals, pagers are how doctors get summoned when someone needs their help.
Now, there was a time when pagers were everywhere.
A lot of business people used to carry pagers, also drug dealers, also, the celebrated rap artist Sir Mixalot came out with a hit song about them in the eighties.
How does mix a lot communicate with beepers?
Baby beepers.
Welcome to Chi paper.
But the cell phone kind of killed the pager.