New York, NY — It was a quiet quarter for Motorola. Sales of their pager line, long thought to be dead and buried next to the fax machine and the Zune, were showing a surprising uptick. Someone in a dark boardroom probably said, “It’s 2024. Pagers are back, baby!” The people of Motorola dared to dream that their retro tech had found a quirky, hipster-fueled second life.
And then, Hezbollah happened.
Motorola’s latest earnings report has dropped with all the subtlety of a bomb—which, in this case, is fitting. In Lebanon, an alleged Mossad operation detonated thousands of pagers, devices reportedly used by Hezbollah to avoid being tracked by Israeli intelligence. Motorola’s stock went from “We’re riding this wave” to “Let’s find new jobs before this hits LinkedIn.”
“We had high hopes for this market,” said Motorola Brittany Milbright. “We thought pagers might be poised for a comeback, but we didn’t plan for the ‘exploding in people’s pockets’ angle.”
Mossad says: ‘We’re Not In the Stock Market.’
Let’s be clear: this is about more than lost sales in Lebanon. It’s about geopolitics, espionage, and the fact that someone figured out how to turn pagers into tiny weapons of mass destruction. Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has neither confirmed nor denied their involvement in what some analysts call “the deadliest comeback for a tech device since Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7.”
When asked to comment, a Mossad spokesperson shrugged (in my head, anyway) and said, “We do not speculate on stock prices. Or explosions. Or, frankly, anything that isn’t directly related to hummus.”
The company’s shares have dropped over 10%. Meanwhile Motorola’s Taiwanese manufacturing partner, Gold Apollo is still trying to figure out how it got dragged into this mess.
One analyst noted, “It turns out ‘explosive growth’ isn’t the kind of growth investors had in mind.”
Amazon Reviews Are… Scathing
This incident’s fallout (pun intended) hasn’t just hit Motorola’s stock price.
The Gold Apollo’s AP924 pager is still selling—sort of —on Amazon.com, but the reviews have taken a omnious turn.
“I was hoping for a nostalgic throwback with this pager. Instead, I ended up in the emergency room. The only ‘retro’ part of this experience was the pager-shaped scar it left on my hip.”
Many reviews complained that the devices has a little too much literal firepower.
Another review, titled “Boom Goes the Pager,” gave the device a measly one star, saying:
“I was trying to live my retro tech dreams. Now, my pager is a Michael Bay movie in my pocket.”
The Q&A section is just as brutal.
“Does this model come with a fire extinguisher, or should I just accept my fate?” Another wrote, “Can I use this as a grenade in case of emergencies, or does it require a subscription plan?”
Hipsters Forced to Reevaluate Their Life Choices
The repercussions aren’t just hitting Hezbollah and Amazon reviewers, though. There’s been a wave of panic across trendy neighborhoods from Brooklyn to Grass Valley, where pagers were slowly making a hipster comeback. For years, hipsters have embraced the kind of technology that died for a reason, from Polaroid cameras to typewriters—and now, pagers. Or, at least, they were.
“The pager was going to be my statement piece,” said Dorian, a 29-year-old artisanal coffee enthusiast dressed in an oversized cardigan and sipping something green from a mason jar. “But if I wanted to carry around a ticking time bomb, I’d just take my smartphone on a plane.”
Walkie-talkies are already rumored to be the next big thing. They’re “retro enough” without all the explosions, making them a safe and non-lethal alternative.
Motorola’s Plans: ‘We Won’t Explode Again’
At Motorola’s headquarters, executives are in damage control mode. “We’re exploring new product lines that aren’t prone to… well, combustion,” said a spokesperson in a statement likely rehearsed 10 minutes before the meeting.
Word on the street is that Motorola is considering anything from vinyl-based laptops to steam-powered smartphones—because nothing says progress like going backward in time. But for now, they’re focused on recovering from what might be the strangest PR crisis in tech history.
“We didn’t see this coming,” the spokesperson admitted. “But we’re confident that we’ll bounce back. After all, it can’t get worse than ‘exploding pagers,’ right?”
As for whether the pager will ever return as a viable product, it’s safe to say that the ship—or should we say, pocket bomb—has sailed.
