Wounded in Action, or The Perils of Pagers, or The Minutiae of Blogging

Posted on December 11, 2006

Being a secretary and the department’s computer guy, I carry a pager for work, in case anything important comes up and I’m in another building on campus. Luckily it’s quiet most of the time, however, when the battery starts to get low, it beeps a few times every half hour. This weekend the pager announced it needed its battery replaced, in its usual annoying manner. As an aside, it’s especially annoying when I’m trying to get to sleep.

When I was at work today, I figured I would replace the battery. The pager uses a AAA battery that’s crammed in. The way the pager is designed, you have to take one end out first. You can’t grab either end of the battery because only one end is showing when the battery cover is off. To make matters worse, most electronics that use these batteries have some sort of spring that serves a dual purpose of keeping the battery in place, yet allowing it to move back and forth when being replaced. This pager doesn’t have that feature. The battery compartment has two electrical contacts and is just big enough to hold the battery. To make sure the battery keeps contact, the battery is more or less wedged into place. Getting a new battery in is no problem, but taking the old one out is problematic.

I got the battery cover off (tricky in itself) and remembered the problems I had with removing the battery on other occassions. I slipped the corner of the tiny battery cover between the battery and the inside of the compartment, hoping to pry the battery out. While I was doing this, some guy was showing me this computer problem he’s been having over the past week, so I was distracted. The cover slipped and the corner roughly sliced the tip of my right index finger. I briefly winced at the pain, then turned my attention to the finger. It took a few seconds for the blood to appear. I excused myself and went to one of the clinic rooms (handy that it happened in a hospital) and grabbed a couple bandages. I slipped one of them on the end of my finger and went back to working on the guy’s computer.

I’m usually pretty stoic about pain, but this is kind of like a papercut. It’s at the end of a finger, so it gets a lot of use when I type. Plus, it’s the right index finger, so it’s probably the finger I use the most. It seems like I traded the annoyance of a pager alarm every half hour for the annoyance of a twinge of pain when I type.

Yeah, I know it’s a lame blog post, but I felt like writing and I thought this would do the trick…sort of.

Related posts:

1. Adventures in self-publishing, pt 1, addendum
2. Consolidation
3. I wanna ride my bicycle
4. Time keeps on slipping
5. Review Haiku – The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai

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