In the days before compact and affordable mobile phones one could buy a pager. A pager could be telephoned and a very brief message could be displayed on its screen. When Sam was being given his teenage freedom to venture out with friends, Chris decided that a pager would be a good way of checking that he was alright. Imagine the difficulty of hearing the pager in a crowded noisy bar or travelling on a bus, and receiving a message ‘Are you okay?’. Sam would then need to find a public telephone to respond ‘Yes, I’m still okay’. In that intermediate period Chris would become frantic with not having received an immediate response, thus sending several more increasingly urgent messages. Sam would know that Mum was at the end of her tether when the very simple message ‘666’ threateningly appeared on screen. The pager became Sam’s ASBO bracelet and Chris always wondered if the pager that eventually disappeared, actually, ‘fell out’ of the bus window one night passing over Kingston Bridge.