Today there's always a cell phone to use or a way to get online, but back in July of 1999 things went haywire when pagers were on the fritz.
Customers like business owners and medical offices were frustrated when their beepers weren't working.
"It's very frustrating especially for the pager clients that are running their businesses with their pagers," said a worker who was fielding angry calls over the situation. "It's very frustrating people are losing business basically."
For others in town, the situation was more serious than losing money.
"Our patients cannot get ahold of us," said an employee at a Davenport cardiologist office, "and like I said they're heart patients and they need to get ahold of us."
She noted that with pagers on the fritz, they couldn't get ahold of physicians when they needed to.
Pagers have been available to the public since the 1970s when Motorola made the first common-use pagers.