As with any job, there's weird stuff that goes on. It wasn't supposed to be weird, but it was a bit of a challenge at NDC to send messages that clearly weren't intended for the expected purpose.
I had mentioned earlier how the pagers were used by a lot of well-known people in the entertainment and sports industries. By the time I started working there, it didn't happen so often. Or if it did, I was rarely aware I was sending a message to someone well-known. Every once in awhile, the caller would mention the name of the recipient. I recall the message was about the subscriber being behind on her account and her car was about to be repossessed. She mentioned the person's name in the message and then said, "Oh, wait. I shouldn't have said her name." I told her it didn't really matter. I assume that the celebrities started telling people who had their pager numbers not to mention who the messages were going to. This should have served as evidence that the alpha-numeric pager industry was starting to go into decline.
I was responsible for dispatching a lot of messages that pertained to many other industries, including financial, medical, maintenance, retail, delivery, oil, etc. Many were run of mill routine issues, but more often than not, callers would leave very personal messages intended for the recipients.
More often than you would believe, I would get callers leaving the following message: "Boo, this is Boo. I love you, Boo. Call me back. Love, Boo." That was SUCH a waste of Revenue Units. And I'll be the subscribers complained when their bills came back so high. And if these were pagers paid for by a company, administration did have access to the messages.
Every once in awhile, I would get a caller wanting to leave a very long-winded message for the subscriber. These messages were very personal and very long and generally detailed the ending of a relationship. They were so long, I would run out of room for all the words. I would inform the caller of this and they would say to send the message, but they wanted another message sent because they hadn't said all they wanted to. This would usually go on two more times. The maximum amount of messages we could send to a single recipient was four. If the caller still wanted to continue, we had to make them call back and get another Dispatch Agent. While I was taking these messages, all I could do was wonder why the caller couldn't just contact the recipient by phone and say all this. Did the subscriber decide they weren't going to talk on the phone anymore and this was going to be their primary means of communication for the rest of their lives? Did the subscriber feel the extra revenue units were worth making the caller mad at them? I never got answers to these questions, but I do know they probably did not have their pagers forever.
We would also get phone calls of a harassing nature. There was a Kaiser doctor's group in Florida. We would often get calls from a gang I call the "Kaiser Kids." It sounded like teenagers calling and pranking us. Someone would come on the line and ask if we had anyone who spoke a foreign language, like Italian or French. (We only had Spanish Dispatch Agents.) If no one spoke the language, they would offer to send a message in English. The message usually contained a profanity. Another agent once told me they had managed to get an Italian speaker on the line and it turned out the kids didn't really speak Italian. But this went on for the almost two years that I worked there. I tended to think of the Kaiser Kids as being like Beavis and Butthead. If you remember the episode in which they prank call a stranger named "Harry Butts," they keep calling him up for months. For them, the joke never got old. That was how it was for these kids.
Of course, there were the calls that were sexually harassing. For the most part, it was women who received them. I noticed that on a couple of accounts, after I read the greeting, whoever it was on the line would hang up. On Sundays, it would happen over and over again with the same account. I found out later that when the caller got a female, he would say perverted things. Since the subscriber's name was included in the greeting, we always knew when the harasser was calling. And we suspected that the caller was the subscriber himself.
Then there was the "Roadkill Caller." Some man would call up a specific account and start leaving the message if a female was on the line. The message said that he had a good time with the recipient. He recalled how they laughed when they had run over a squirrel and when she farted, it smelled good. I knew about the message because many of the female Dispatch Agents actually sent that message out. The subscriber was livid that she was receiving these messages. (However, I noticed she never changed her pager number.)
I myself did once receive a sexually harassing call from a male caller. It was a pager for a chiropractor's office. The caller started, "I have a bone. It goes up, but it won't go down. It's a boner!" GRRRR! I hung up on that guy.
I guess the worst thing about the harassers is that we couldn't do anything about them. We couldn't track them. We couldn't have them arrested. We couldn't make it impossible for them to call us up. We were at their mercy. But I can't tell you how much I would have loved to locate those Kaiser Kids and teach them a lesson, Harry Butts-style.
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