The once-ubiquitous beeper’s days are numbered. As of 27 August Verizon will discontinue their beeper service and Tricom is not accepting new clients for the localizer service. We now have to bid adieu to the alpha-numeric messages, the “beeper girls”, the mini-messages, and, someday perhaps, the “beeper dance”, a merengue that was created from the fact that when a beeper goes off, everyone stops what they are doing to look for their gadget. Only 17 years have gone past since beepers were introduced to the Dominican Republic, and now it has been dealt a mortal blow by the cellular phone. At the turn of the century, there were 200,000 beepers registered in the DR, but today Verizon has just 10,388 active accounts. There are currently over one million cell phone users in the Dominican Republic.