How Did Pagers Work?
Within three hours of posting a free broken stove on Craigslist, the phone rang. “Are you at home? Because I’m in front of your house looking at this thing, and if you help me get it in my truck, I’m taking it.”
A stranger, late forties, white guy with a pick up ten years old. He had all the loose parts gathered up and loaded in the bed: burners, couplings, the chrome griddle and venting. We got on it and tilted it back into the truck.
And then we began talking. About remodeling. About the Indonesians and Chinese making all the cabinets and shipping them over here in “flat packs” to be assembled on shore.
I told him photographers take their digital files and email them to Indonesia where they are processed and color corrected. Almost any American today can contract out slave labor to help them with their job. We talked about that, this stanger and I.
“I used to work with Motorola, designing pagers,” he said. That brought a smile to my face. Pagers are obsolete technology, like the Okeefe & Merritt gas oven he had in his truck now. I like obsolete. “It was only a buck cheaper to assemble them overseas than in Florida, where we were. But we could mark up the cost and not pay taxes on it. That’s why electronics corporations go overseas. There aren’t any human hands touching that stuff, it’s all automated. It’s mostly to avoid taxes.”
His wife gave him a call and he had to go. I was up the stairs heading into the house and I heard his truck rumble away. I hope he enjoys his oven.