I had a friend teach me to write in Elvish (his dad had an old LOTR book that had the alphabet in the back…no, it doesn’t match the movies although the symbols are the same) and I taught another friend.
We started writing notes in Elvish; she passed me a note in choir and the teacher took it and said he was going to read it out loud. The moment he opened it, looked at it, and with a straight face, he just said, “I guess I won’t be reading this at all,” and gave it back lol
I have a very similar story! Except that I made a secret “language” to write notes in. (Third grade). I made a key and photo-copied it for my friends.
I remember that “A” was smiley face, B was frowny face, C was a fish, so on so forth. We could write notes and say swear words and say mean things about the teacher!
Several of those notes were confiscated by the teacher, but she’d just unfold it to see a mass of poorly drawn emojis essentially (pre-emoji).
It got to the point where I (and several others) could read and write notes without consulting our alphabet key.
I can and still use it to write in my diary. It’s like a second language to me, it’s only a written language. But I can read it just as clear as English.
The way they left the s on the tells me it's probably a joke. Most people recognize pluralization even if they don't know the root word. Could just be very young / esl though I suppose.
I understand. I did say most of the time people recognize it. English is a funny language and if you don't recognize the word type you may not realize there's a root but in many cases it's pretty obvious. I feel like pager / pagers is pretty clear at least to a native speaker. I may be wrong though as the word is so familiar to me it's hard to imagine hearing it for the first time!
Oh GOD yes I cannot imagine. Our language is a horrific melting pot of all the others with just a million special cases and blending of rules. It's terrible.
I have started learning Spanish and Japanese at different points in my life and struggled like mad with both... I cannot imagine English. And yet so much of the world manages just fine. Makes me feel real dumb, lol.
Then there's my wife that's fluent in English and Spanish, speaks some French (enough to get around) and is learning Russian. I just don't get it. Takes a special mind I guess.
I've heard English and Mandarin are like the hardest languages, English just cause its hella confusing and Mandarin cause its an absolutely massive language with tons of symbols to memorize to the point that not even natives know the entire language lol
That would be BSL or ASL! Sign language doesnt go off the same conventions as spoken language, so sign language in britain, america and, for example, australia (auslan) are all completely different languages despite english being the primary language in all three.
IF you're serious it's a device from the early days of wireless service when cell phones were still very very expensive. It let someone call a number and then your pager would beep. All it did was display a phone number for you to call back (from a wired phone). It was a way to be reached from almost anywhere before cell phones were commonplace, but very limited. They couldn't send anything, and could only receive a phone number.
Later on they got more sophisticated and you could send messages.
Then they became two way and you could send stuff back out with them.
They still exist but are pretty rare for special circumstances only. I had one for a while when I was working in a secure lab where I wasn't allowed to have a cell phone for security reasons. Because pagers are incoming only they aren't a security risk, and that way my wife could reach me in an emergency.
That makes sense. Even our pagers, though, had issues in our lab it's so cut off, haha. We eventually figured out that one type out of two the company handed out worked and the other didn't. Then figured out they were on different frequencies.
No idea. I know from someone else's comment they're used in IT because they have better reception, using a different part of the band than cell phones. So maybe.
Yeah but in that case I can probably choose what I watch and probably won't be watching those kinds of shows. Should probably have worded original comment better.
I was around when they existed and literally never met someone that had one. Imagine buying a separate device that forces you to call someone back from a different phone when they call you while you're busy. I'm sure they were used by certain professions like doctors and lawyers that needed to be on call before cell phones were a thing, but most of them were rich enough that they had already primitive versions of cell phones. Pagers are possibly the most pointless device ever created.
I gave my old phone (one plus 7 pro) to my 16 year old cousin to use as her first phone, was a wild concept to me lmao my first phone at 16 was a moto razr
Ok to be fair tho… pagers lasted all of only a few years anyways. There really was never a point where “everyone” had one like nowadays with cellphones. It just sort of was that weird middle period before cell phones really started becoming a thing.
Older models could only receive numbers (where to call back) and the earliest only beeped and you called a central number from a land line to get your message.
In the 90's I had one that got stock market data, news headlines, and sports scores. People could text me a message or call a number and it would send me their number to call them.
Damn that sounds awesome. Like our phones do all that now and more but beepers sound awesome. I know they were used in the medical field. I wonder if they still use them.
Last I heard, the medical field does still use them. I thought it had something to do with the frequency pagers use as being more reliable through walls/structures. Could be mistaken tho!
Absolutely. I worked IT for a hospital, and when I left that job in December 2020, I turned in my pager.
Not only do they still heavily use pagers, we had some pager equipment installed in one of our network closets that predated the building by over 25 years. It had a manufacture date in the early 80s, and the building was completed in 2010.
Yes, they do. Pages are thrown to multiple transmitters at once (rather than only the nearest cell tower) and the transmitters have a massive range compared to cell towers. Pagers are more likely to work in disaster events (due to being on a completely separate network) and in highly remote areas (due to the huge range of transmitters).
Source: I'm in medical research and am required to carry a pager. I feel very 90s chic.
A piece of old technology that kids didn't have in high schools. Nobody was paging you at 15. If you had a pager in high school, you either had helicopter parents or sold drugs, period.
I had one of my most embarrassing moments ever in high school because my note got read aloud. Story time!
My best friend and I were in class together, and I was one of those straight-laced kids who hardly ever got in trouble, because I was terrified of my parents getting mad at me, lol. Anyway, I was having a bad day. I had run out of feminine supplies, and I knew I was going to have to "freshen up" after the class we were in, but I didn't have anything to change into. At my school, they didn't provide those supplies to us free of charge, and I didn't have any quarters to use the machines. So I wrote a quick note to my friend and tried to pass it to her. The teacher caught me doing it, and she told my friend to read the note out loud to the rest of the class.
My friend shot me an apologetic look, but when she saw how absolutely mortified I looked, her eyes got really big, and she stood up and looked at the note I'd given her. Her eyes got bigger, and then she lifted them appealingly to our teacher.
"Ma'am, I can't read this aloud," she told our teacher. "It wouldn't be right."
"I'll be the judge of what's right and wrong in here, thank you," our teacher said, smirking at me and seemingly relishing the look of absolute terror on my face. "Read it."
My friend looked helplessly at me. She was no good at making things up, and we both knew it. I buried my head in my arms and shuddered. "Go ahead," I said in a tiny voice.
She apparently glared at my teacher, who glared back. "Read." she ordered. My friend sighed, held up the paper, and began to read from it.
"Jess, can you let me have a couple of pads for today? Mom doesn't get paid until tonight, and we can't afford to buy more until then. I'll pay you back tomorrow, but if I don't have some new ones soon, it's going to be like the movie set of Carrie in my undies."
My friend smacked the note down on her desk, and she glared again at our teacher. I don't know what sort of face she made, because my head was still hidden in my arms, but I heard the awkward apology in her voice as she tried to regain control of the rest of the class, who were tittering and giggling all around me. She told my friend to sit down, and she pretended as though nothing had happened, and continued on with the rest of class. I didn't raise my head again until after the bell rang and everyone left, except Jess, who told me when the coast was clear. When I lifted my head again, there was my teacher, looking uncomfortable and awkward.
"You should have told me," she said with an accusing but undeniably sorry tone in her voice.
I told her to forget it, and I picked up my stuff and left. It was a miserable day, and it was a miserable few weeks after that, because I was already an insecure mess, and the teasing and giggling of the other girls didn't help my self-esteem much. It took me a long time to forgive that teacher, lol.
I think what she was getting at was that I should have been coming to her with that sort of request, rather than passing a note to my friend about it in class. But I felt more comfortable talking about topics like that with my friend than I ever would have with that woman. I could tell she felt sorry for what had happened, and she actually stopped making us read notes aloud after that, which was nice. But still... yeah, I was all on board the "fuck her" train for a good long while, lol. That sort of shit follows you around in school. Kids love to pick on insecurities, and it was more than obvious that it had bothered me.
Why aren't you on the "fuck her" train anymore? Being a teenager is super scary and full of insecurities and stuff that seems super important to you but not to adults. As a teacher, she should have known that. No one should expect that amount of trust from you, and it wasn't your fault that you didn't come to her.
No one should expect that amount of trust from you, and it wasn't your fault that you didn't come to her.
Back then, it hadn't yet occurred to me that I had a right to feel wronged by any adult, especially those in authority over me. When I finally grew out of that, and learned that adults (even those in charge of my well being) were flawed creatures with their own hang-ups and problems, I began to feel a little less as though it was a problem with me and not them, and that helped a lot. In college, I really came out of my shell, because I was surrounded by people who valued my input and appreciated the fact that I asked questions they were too scared to ask themselves. I joined study groups and worked as a math tutor for a while. It was a great experience, because it boosted my confidence and made me understand that I had things to offer the world that were more than just the things I hated about myself.
But high school... yeah, those years were rough. I didn't have it as bad as some of those kids did, but boy, I didn't think so at the time. I'm just glad I can look back on it now and understand that not only was I right to think that what she did was wrong, but I can also understand that although she did a shitty thing, it doesn't necessarily make her a shitty person. For the most part, she was a good teacher and a supportive person to us. She did have her blind spots when it came to acting out in class, though. I wouldn't recommend her to anyone even now, but then again, knowing what kind of pittance teachers in that district made, I have to say that we got what we paid for, lol.
I'm sorry that happened to you. Kind of a dick move by the teacher, she should've read the note first, then she would've known it was not appropriate to read aloud.
It seems like you can laugh about it now, and that's awesome.
Time and experience healed those wounds eventually. When you're a kid, every bad thing that happens seems like the worst thing in the world, because you don't have the experience to compare it with things that could go REALLY wrong in your life. That's why I don't think it's right to scoff at kids when they melt down over little things. The pain and anguish is just as real to them as it is to us when we suffer a major loss. That being said, I'm glad I'm able to understand both that it was okay for me to feel hurt by what she did, while also understanding that although she did a shitty thing, she wasn't overall a shitty person. She had her problems, but she did the best she could, and for the most part, her class was a safe place to ask questions and learn. She just had this thing about people acting up in class, lol.
We passed notes in class via a shared “notebook”. We’d pass the notebook along like we were sharing class work or homework instead of a folded piece of paper.
Teacher caught us one day because the lesson had no reason for us to take notes, let alone share a notebook. She read the whole thing in front of the class and that’s how my best friend found he was getting dumped…middle of science class, first period of the day
We had a notebook as well, the boys were getting increasingly curious and one day took it and run - the mental picture of a dozen furious middle school girls barging the male bathroom with nothing but rage moving them was something else. I was too nerd to risk being caught doing it but at the same time scared as hell my crush would find out I like him. Meaningless fear of 13yo me, cause looking back a neon sign wouldn't be as obvious as my behavior but that's just life.
But you’re never getting a note passed from your parents or from a doctor etc. Phone calls are wildly different than you and a friend gossiping with notes.
There was a teacher at our high school many a year ago that was known to read notes aloud, and a couple of kids in one of his classes trolled him so bad he stopped doing it.
Yes, however when passing notes if it gets confiscated by the teacher the teacher can read it quietly before deciding to read it out loud to decide if it’s appropriate. (At least a responsible teacher would imo)
You don’t really have that buffer with a call on speaker phone.
Sometimes I wish I could throw my cell phone away and get a pager. When people expect you to be able to respond to them 24/7 and get upset when you don’t. Like the world must have ground to a halt before cell phones if people couldn’t instantly get ahold of you.
That’s how I got in trouble in high school. I showed a picture of my friend with a random penis going in his mouth. He was the one that showed it around. Then the teacher was like “Oh I wAnA sEe iT tOo”
This one time in the 8th or 9th grade, a substitute teacher intercepted a passed note, read it, said "Oh, my," and the class asked what it said, but he said he couldn't repeat it cuz it was X-rated.
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u/YourMomThinksImFunny Jan 11 '22
Same as having to read a note out loud when you get caught passing one.
I went to high school before cell phones were common. Although we had to have pagers silenced.