It was dark on the back roads and I drove carefully from the scene of the killing. It was in the town of Vienna, or possibly Veazie, and I was in a rush getting back. Deadline was an issue, you know, as it always is when you have hot news but you’re far away.

Fortunately, technology bailed me out. As soon as I started fretting about the deadline matter, the gizmo attached to my belt began to chirp, increasingly louder like a bird on crack.

Ah, the pager. Back in the day, mostly only doctors and drug dealers had them, so I felt blessed. The doohickey not only alerted me that I was being sought, a light display also revealed who I needed to call.

What a marvel of modern convenience. With that information at hand, all I had to do was wend my way through Veazie, or possibly Vassalboro, in search of a phone booth. I imagined the poor slobs who came before me, doctors, drug dealers and reporters who had no way of knowing when someone was looking for them. How the hell did they get by?

There was a Sunoco on the side of the road, but it was closed and there was no pay phone. Farther along was a convenience store where you could by beer and a hunting license, but that was dark as well.

I drove another 4 miles down an eely road and found a service station with a phone booth right out front. The phone had been ripped from the cord so I had to drive on, wondering what kind of fury a man would find in Veazie or Vienna to drive him to such madness.

Two miles and three twisting roads later, I found another phone booth and this one was in working order. But I didn’t have a quarter, so I had to root through the garbage heap in my back seat. A handful of pennies, all slicked with something I didn’t care to think about. A greasy nickel, a tie tack, a glass eye.

At last, I found a quarter stuck to the bottom of a Big Mac box and I was in business. I dashed to the phone, checked the number on the pager and dialed.

It was an editor calling from the newspaper. He wanted to remind me that I was pushing deadline and I damn well better get back in a hurry if I wanted to keep my job.

How I hated the pager. I would suggest that they are useful only as paperweights these days, but I don’t want to give the things even that much worth.

Which leads me to the point of this column, which took me about as much time to reach as a phone booth in Vienna, or possibly Mount Vernon.

I was in a cell phone store the other day listening to a middle-aged guy bitching to a clerk. He had an account at the store and phones for each of his daughters. He was under the impression that when one daughter took a photo with her five megapixel phone camera, it would be automatically received by each of his other daughters near instantaneously.

The clerk told him: nope. That was not a function supplied by this particular phone and the customer became exasperated, as though he had been told his dear daughters would have to wear second-rate braces and use phones with rotary dial.

That the man was irritated by this lack of simultaneous photo uploading made me want to key his Lexus. I had a strong feeling that his oldest daughter was 14 and that the whole lot of them had the capability to call, text message or e-mail their friends no matter what time of day or where they are.

They could surf the web in the palms of their hands, chronicle their lives of hair styles and boyfriends through blogs and photographs and share with everyone in their social networks.

This man’s daughters would never be at the side of the road with a flat tire, wondering how far they would have to walk to call for help. They could produce video of their dilemma and send it on to daddy so he could decide how best to extract them.

All that, and this fool was complaining because it wasn’t enough. And it made me think of the Dark Ages of pagers, which was way back in the 1990s, as I recall.

If I had even a basic cell phone model then, I could have filed photos and a complete story from the scene of the crime.

I could have recorded breathless accounts from witnesses on the phone recorder and uploaded those to the newspaper server.

I could have sent text messages to all my friends to advise them of what a fantastic reporter I was, getting my story in hours before deadline.

I could have used Google Maps to determine whether I was in Vienna or Veazie and charted a route to get the hell out of there.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].