A radiopager user : Malcolm Wright

Transcript

When I first joined the coast guard, which was in 1973, I remember how archaic their telephone system looked. It was perfectly functional but it was really very old. It was still the old kind of heavy Bakelite type phone, the black one, and in fact we used to have to ring through to Bracknell every hour with the met reports, the meteorological reports. In those days to ring the phone at their end you had to put your hand on this box and turn this handle rapidly, so it was almost something like out of Dad's Army. In those days we still used to fire the maroon. They then introduced first the radio pagers and they were a tremendous benefit but they were very heavy. They were about the size of the old fashioned kind of tobacco tins. We've now got BT pagers rather than radio pagers and they'll go off anywhere in the country, but also they've got the screen so that you can get a message on there and so you can be told what kind of incident, where they want you to go, and so on. I think professionally, as a coast guard it's new technology that's given me freedom. I can I can do what I want; I can go where I want and I know that people can get hold of me. My BT pager is used in school too so that the staff can get hold of me.