Today marks the anniversary of the Columbine shootings. This has had me confused for some time, as I clearly remember getting alpha-numeric pagers at my old job right before the Columbine shootings, and yet I also clearly remember getting them in November or something. The pagers we got were an AT&T model that had a NewsAlert thingy with four mail-slots of news pushed down by the pager-provider. As it happens, I didn't care about it but they just CAME with the pagers so we had to live with them. We'd had them all of two days before the school shooting happened, and we were ALL getting updates every 15-30 minutes. This was before most of us figured out how to turn off the vibrate alert when a new one arrived. This caused a lot of us to figure out how to do it.
It was on the drive in to work today that I finally remembered which school shooting it was: Jonesboro. Which was March, not November. Still, that was it. The experience was similar to twitter-bombing after a major event causes everyone on my follow list to comment about something within 30 minutes of the event. Only, this was in 1998, the medium was the alpha-numeric pager, and the source was a major news outlet of some kind.
It was on the drive in to work today that I finally remembered which school shooting it was: Jonesboro. Which was March, not November. Still, that was it. The experience was similar to twitter-bombing after a major event causes everyone on my follow list to comment about something within 30 minutes of the event. Only, this was in 1998, the medium was the alpha-numeric pager, and the source was a major news outlet of some kind.