Whether you’re a flight attendant, a railway worker, or part of the emergency services, chances are you’ll be using a pager for a large portion of your professional life. So, if you’re new to the job, or even an old hand, you might be interested to discover a little more about pager code. Usually, numeric pagers are good for quick telephone numbers and little else – or so it would appear. But lurking beneath the surface is a secret, Dan Brown-esque world of ciphers and hidden messages, waiting to be discovered.

Da Vinci’s Pager

Back in the days when our pagers could only transmit numbers, enterprising individuals came up with a simple solution to communicating specific messages over the pager itself; not just relying on a trip to the nearest telephone (if there was one!) to give instructions, chat about the weather, or even arrange a clandestine investigation into solving confusing centuries-old puzzles. Although that last one probably didn’t come up much outside of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code!

Numeric Codes

When communicating over pagers, a few simple numeric codes could be substituted for short, easy messages. For example, ‘411’ stood for ‘where are you?’, while 911 was the accepted code for an emergency. But for the romantics amongst pager users, there are a few, lesser known, codes that can save time. ‘1-4-3’ means ‘I love you’, while ‘8-2-3’ is used in place of ‘thinking of you’. Just the thing for a long shift or journey if you and your partner can both use pagers.

The Language Barrier

Interestingly, some numerical shorthand codes developed in different regions. For example, ‘hurry’ could be communicated by using ’82’ through pagers. In Korean, the number 82 is ‘pal yi’, which when spoken aloud sounds like ‘bbal yi’, the Korean phrase for ‘fast’.

But using short batches of numbers across pagers to stand in for longer messages would only go so far – you’d need a book bigger than the pager itself to remember all of them! So over time, a system was developed that indirectly led to ‘text speak’- using combinations of numbers to represent letters instead of words. Which ev0lved 2 8e th3 t3xtsp3ak of 2day.

Pager Displays

There’s a little debate about which system is universally used for pagers. Something to remember is that, due to the eight-bar liquid crystal display pagers used (which you’ll probably also remember from old calculators and the first digital alarm clocks), some of the numbers could look like letters. From using 8 in place of B, and 4 instead of Y, systems involved replacing each letter with a single number or several, depending on what would look like the letter involved. For example, on pagers, M could become 177, as on the LCD screen, it would look more like an M!

Crack the Code

Here’s a sample code: A = 6, B = 8, C = 0, D =0, E=3, F=7, G =6, H =4, I =1, J =7, K =15, L =7, M =177, N =17, O =0, P =9, Q =9, R =12, S =5, T =7, U =11, V =11, W =111, X =22, Y =4, Z =2. As you can read, some numbers are re-used. With 26 letters to 10 numbers, some will have to be – it adds a double layer to pager code, as working out the letters from the numbers is one thing, and then filling in any blanks or possible combinations to create the whole message is another. It’s definitely a challenge for your spare time, or convenient while on the job, to use pagers for sending longer messages. And perhaps even cryptic clues…

Author Bio: Jenny Kettlewell is the Marketing Manager for Multitone Systems, a tele communications strategies company that has provided pagers and paging systems for organisations in the public and private sector for many years.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: pagers