After coming out of the teahouse, the group came to the street.
"Boss Wan! Where are we going now?"
As they walked, Wan Feng asked Ye Qianwen, "Is it still so difficult to buy a mobile phone in Shenzhen now?"
Ye Qianwen shook his head: "It's impossible to buy it, even if I ask someone to buy it for me."
"And the pager?"
What surprised Wan Feng was that Ye Qianwen dared to show a confused expression to the pager.
"How did you manage to be such a jerk? You don't even know about pagers."
"So it's a pager? Why didn't you just say pager? You confused me by calling it a pager. Pagers are available, but it seems few people wear them."
In 1983, China's first paging station appeared in Shanghai. At that time, users of pagers could only receive call signals and had to call the paging station to find out the call-back number.
In 1984, a digital paging station was opened in Guangzhou, and the call-back number could appear directly on the pager, which greatly improved the convenience of using the pager.
However, this innovation did not bring about a fundamental change in the development of the pager. In the following years, this seemingly advanced instant messaging tool was met with a cold reception. Because people did not understand the purpose of this small black box that made sounds, and the price of more than 2,000 yuan was already a year's salary for an average person at the time, the pager's development remained lukewarm.
It was not until the 1990 Beijing Asian Games that every conference staff member wore a pager, and pagers began to become well known to the general public and entered thousands of households.
Shenzhen's wireless paging industry was founded in October 1984, when China Telecom established the first paging station.
But just like the situation across the country, it is still half-dead.
Even someone like Ye Qianwen, who has been in Shenzhen for more than two years, has never seen many people wearing that thing.
“Where can I buy it?”
"Sage!"
Wan Feng slapped his head and thought, SEG specializes in electronic products, so of course the paging station must set up a stall in SEG.
"Let's go to Seg now."
Everyone was not quite sure why Wan Feng suddenly asked about the pager and then went to SEG.
But he turned around and ran towards Sage without objection.
SEG Market is very large, and each stall is very small. Finding a stall there is as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack.
It would save a lot of time if you had someone you know to lead the way.
Xu Bin became the acquaintance that Wan Feng had been hoping for.
Unfortunately, this acquaintance was only vaguely known, and Xu Bin didn't know where in the hall to buy pagers.
Fortunately, the neighbor of his stall knew where the stall selling pagers was, and the girl with a slightly flat nose personally took Wan Feng and the others to the stall selling pagers.
The stall is more than one meter wide and several meters long, and is blocked by high partitions on both sides, like a dark corridor.
There are only two brands of pagers on the counter: Motorola and Panasonic, both of which are the earliest vertical pagers that are viewed from one end.
This is the ugliest model of pager.
Wan Feng always thought that Motorola's best-looking digital pager was the pocket-sized horizontal model, which was the model he used in his previous life.
Even such an ugly pager is priced at 1,600 yuan each.
There was also a piece of paper next to it which said that the network access fee was 100 yuan and the service fee was 120 yuan.
Damn, it's so damn expensive.
In his previous life, Wan Feng owned a pager in 1998 when pagers were becoming obsolete. At that time, joining the network was free and the monthly service fee was only 30 yuan.
But it’s 1988 now, so it’s normal to be a little more expensive.
There was no customer at the counter, and a young waitress was leisurely doing her nails.
The girl is very serious about trimming her nails, which is really a sign that she has nothing to do.
When she saw Wan Feng and his group coming over, she just looked up and then continued to trim her nails.
There are many people coming and going here every day, but very few of them buy things. In order not to waste her expressions and smiles, the girl simply turns a blind eye.
Wan Feng knocked on the counter glass: "Miss! Buy a pager."
The girl doing the manicure looked at Wan Feng with a bit of disbelief: "You want to buy a pager?"
Wan Feng was speechless. Six people came to your counter and didn’t buy pagers but came to watch you get your nails done!
Wan Feng nodded.
The girl then put down the nail clippers in her hand and came to the counter: "Which style do you want to buy?"
There were only two models of pagers on the counter, and there was no room for choice.
"Can you offer a discount on your BB machines?"
The girl shook her head without thinking. The boss said that if you buy three or five machines, you can get a moderate discount, but there is no discount for one or two machines.
"What if I buy more? For example, if I buy ten units, how much discount can I get?"
"I don't know about this. You have to ask the boss." She had never seen anyone buy ten pagers at once.
"Notify your boss immediately and tell him that a big client has arrived."
The girl was skeptical: "Are you really going to buy ten pagers?"
"Do you think I'm kidding you? Hurry up, it's best to get your boss here within ten minutes, we're in a hurry."
The girl locked the counter, asked the neighbor next door to look after it, and then ran out to make a pager call.
There was a public phone in the mall, and her boss was wearing a pager, so it was not difficult to find his boss.
"What's the use of this thing?" Ye Qianwen asked while looking at the pager on the counter.
At that time, many people didn’t know what this little thing was used for.
"Looking for someone to use it."
"It can find people, but how does it find them?"
"It's very simple. Every pager has a fixed number and a paging station. If I want to find you, I can call the paging station where your pager is located and ask the pager to page you. Then your pager will make a beeping sound, and you will know that someone is looking for you. When you take out your pager, you will see the phone number that is looking for you."
"Then what?"
"Then you just find the phone and answer it. That's it. Do you all understand?"
Everyone nodded.
Ye Qianwen blinked and asked a question from a novel angle: "What if I can't find the phone?"
"Then don't call back. Don't worry, there will be more and more public telephones in the future. There will be rows of telephones on both sides of the street. It will be impossible to not find a phone."
After IC card phones came out, there were telephone booths everywhere.
In ten years or so, more and more people will have mobile phones, and returning calls will not be a problem at all.
But then again, once mobile phones become more and more popular, pagers will become obsolete.
This thing was only popular for a few years. When pagers were at their peak in Shenzhen, it was said that every three people had one, and a pager girl could make more than 10,000 page calls a month.
How about letting Zhang Xuan work on the pager?
This thought flashed through Wan Feng's mind like lightning.
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