Life, actually…
WHEN BIPPY AND BEEPER RULED
“Beep me.”
“Page me.”
“Call my pager.”
“Here’s my beeper number.”
“Uh, where’s the charger?”
If you remember all these phrases and thoughts, you are getting on up in age. Looking back, it is difficult to understand how beepers were a real Thing for a time.
Much ado about mostly nothing.
The concept of non-emergency crises seems to have been invented just in time for paging, right before we learned to spend our waking hours on inconsequential matters via thumb-poked phone.
Yes, Children of the 21st. Back before and during my time, there were no cellphones.
We did have other ways to communicate, each of which came and went as fashion swayed to and fro.
There were walkie-talkies and two-way radios and telephones and telegrams and semaphores and smoke signals and megaphones and tin cans joined by string…
And voice to voice hosepipes and postcards and letters.
There was sky writing, there was the Pony Express, there were letter carriers, there were pigeons and couriers and, and…well, there were plenty of ways to communicate, plenty of ways to annoy someone.
Great inventions all.
But progress often accompanies regress.
With any communications advance comes the opportunity to relay useless and irritating messages.
Then came beepers, a 1970s fashion accessory, invented right before hand-toted electronics conquered the world.
Invented at the same time but in parallel societies was the bippy.
The bippy was a verbal device designed to make you giggle. Used only by comedians and wisecrackers, bippy had no meaning at all. Later, made-up words like yahoo and google were inspired by bippy.
Silly and meaningless and unforgettable.
Back then, during bippy and beeper times, every executive or entrepreneur or professional just had to possess a beeper. Clipped to belt or purse or pocket, peeping out from a holster, hiding deep within an inside pocket, there lurked a beeper, a pager, or whatever else they were called.
When your beeper “went off” or paged you, you were required to grab a nearby phone and “call the office” or “call home” to see what the urgency was.
This made you feel connected, important, superior.
Whatever happened to all those beepers that are now cast aside?
For that matter, whatever happened to bippies and bippy jokes?
Bippy jokes made us chuckle even when we were not feeling so chuckly.
I’d like to spend just five minutes one day, once more contemplating my bippy and responding to my beeper. Five minutes would be about all I could tolerate.
You can bet your sweet bippy, er, beeper, it would be harmless fun.
And harmless, non-judgmental, non-shaming fun is exactly what I could use a bit more of.
Pardon my grammar. My beeper just went off and my bippy made me do it
(c) 2021 A.D. by Jim Reed
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