On my Amazon.com pager

(This is an assignment for my creative writing class)

I have a pretty decent collection of gadgetry and electronic devices. I have a couple computers, one with a touch screen. I have a home server that coughs dust out the fan exhaust port but does it's job adequately. I have three laptops, one for work, one for play and one for working while playing or playing while working. My time working on mobile and embedded devices left me a nice collection of phones and music players. When I go to bed, there's nine or ten blinking lights wishing their master good night. I am the master of my devices, with one exception.


Part of writing code for a live site like Amazon is ownership of it, so when a piece of code breaks the developing team has to fix it before someone can’t buy a book and the company misses out on five dollars of revenue. Somewhere a monitor notices something is wrong which triggers something that triggers something else that triggers another thing in the software-Rube-Goldberg machine that is Amazon.com's architecture. At the end of it all, a pager goes off and a developer somewhere rustles out of whatever he or she was doing and gets to work. And since I'm on call this week for my team, that would be my pager.


Pagers seem so 1990s. They are one way communication in an era where we're used to all communication being two-way. Someone (or something) wants my attention and wants me to do stuff. If they called me, we’d have a conversation and I’d be able to explain to them why they’re wrong and why the thing that’s melting down isn’t actually my team’s responsibility so won’t they kindly take care of it. If nothing else, they’d know that there’s a human being somewhere else who’s life was just inconvenienced. Maybe they'd feel guilty about waking someone up at three in the morning. But when it's time to send a page, it's as simple as changing one box on a web page or sending mail to page- at amazon.com. The pager is an interface to me that lets someone (or something) interact with my engineering functionality without dealing with my human flaws. Of course this isn't entirely necessary for the bulk of pages for my team, which are caused by automated monitoring processes. These processes never feel guilty.


I’m on call for my team right now, so my pager occupies a slot on my right hip. It’s a cheap piece of plastic with a battery in it and slides right in to a cheap plastic belt clip. My hands hate being idle, so when I’m standing around, I’ll pop it out of its holster, fidget with it, then snap it back in. I wish there was a trigger guard on it so I could twirl it around like some old west gunfighter. But when I take it out and reholster it, I don’t bother to look at it for new messages. When they come in, I’ll know.


Pagers have many faults, but lack of volume isn’t one of them. I think that’s the one reason Amazon spends money on pagers instead of using people’s cell phones. You can sleep through your cell phone. Maybe it’s on vibrate, maybe the volume is low, maybe it’s the same jingle or song clip that you’ve heard a thousand times before. The sound of your phone ringing is a pleasant, welcoming noise. Somewhere, a friend or family member of significant other wants you and you can look forward to a nice chat about your day and plan something to do in the near future. The ring of a phone is a friendly “Hello.” This pager going off is the electronic equivalent of “OHMYGODOHMYGOD.” It’s not even a normal sounding alert noise. Plenty of devices emit a single-frequency tone that is perfectly neutral. My pager seems to have a little something else to it. There's a little bit of static that comes out of the speaker when it goes off, not totally noticeable but enough to slink its way in to your ear canal and rattle around there. It's almost supernatural really, like the fact that a machine is crying out for your help results possesses your device to actually cry out for help. My pager isn't just a collection of circuits and wires, it's powered by some banshee.


If you’re awake when it goes off, it’ll be a nice shock to your ears and product burst of adrenaline. This is doubly true if you are fast asleep, it’s three in the morning and some automatic monitor thinks one of the servers is down and wants a human to check it out to make sure. Stop and think about it for a second. A machine somewhere suspects that there's a problem, so it deems that the best thing to do is to rouse a human out of bed to go and make sure everything is okay. I don't know what that means about my order in the universe, but I do know that it has bad implications for my willingness to defy machine overlords when the robot uprising is upon us.