So, as Napolean's brother says in the movie, " I still love technology," but sometimes, the advancements in this computerized age have meant a gross setback in creative services. Especially in today's youth. Gone are the days of making random prank calls to Hooked On Phonics from payphones at a bowling alley. Nowadays, not only would the kid call from his cellphone, but chances are the call would be traced back to them and they would get in trouble. Which is why the payphone was so ingenius. Nonetheless, this isn't the only example. We all remember sitting with a blank tape in front of the radio trying to time the record function at the same exact moment that the annoying DJ would hit the ****ing post, and being severely pissed off when you forgot to hit stop until halfway through the song AFTER the one you wanted to record. Nowadays? Well, if you want a free song or two, simply swipe those ****ing songs right off the internet and voila, insta-pro cd mashup. Sure, all of these things are convenient, but where it the creativity and gusto that was inspired by the challenges of the mid-90's? Which leads me to my main point of this note: Pager Code Now anyone above the age of say...25 probably just threw their hands in the air and said "awwwwwww sheeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiitttttttt," out loud. Because you know exactly what I am talking about. This numbers for letters alphabet was, at the time, the closest thing we had to texting. 177 was an "M", while 143 meant "I love you." And each message was followed by the person's personal pager code whic was supposedly unique for everyone (I was 1013). Yearbooks were signed with wishes of an awesome summer and to "hit someone up" on their beeper. Some of us really cool kids had multiple pagers, and somewhere, there is a Beeper Man sitting inside of his Beeper City with millions of beepers wondering just what the hell went wrong. No, during the explosion of pagers in the early to mid 90's, you know longer had to be a drug dealer or a doctor to hang one of these off your hip, but you damn sure almost had to be a codebreaker to figure out just what the **** people were beeping you with. Which brings us to an interesting challenge for this note. If you wish to respond to this note, please do so in pager code. The next person shall then interpret said code, and respond in pager code themselves. I guarantee without a cheatsheet, that none of you youngins could even come close to figuring out the sheer genius that was/is pager code. Hell, my generation invented it and I would be lucky to be able to figure it out myself. But here it goes, your official pager code crib sheet: A = 8 B = 8 C = 6 D = 0 E = 3 F = 4 G = 6 H = 4 I = 1 J = 7 K = 15 L = 7 M = 177 N = 17 O = 0 P = 9 Q = 0 R = 12 S = 5 T = 7 U = 11 V = 11 W = 111 X = 25 Y = 4 Z = 2 7415 15 986312 6003 81764 ( This is pager code ***** )
