The other day, Nick, my 20 year old, called me in Miami on his cell phone from a crowded sidewalk in Manhattan. "Dad, are you at your computer?". I knew what was coming next. "Can you check a phone number for me?" You see, I've become the occasional telephone directory for my twenty something sons. With a few taps on google or Yahoo, I have what they want; the number, the address, and a street view. Charlie once called me from the Pacific Coast Highway looking for a hotel room (reasonably priced but not too far from the ocean). I could help him, too.
Which all speaks to the abbreviated life of the telephone directory, reported on the news wire. What's a "wire"? Never mind. I was never much fond of telephone books. They took up a lot of space. The white pages you could usually fit in a drawer by the telephone. I had a grudge against the yellow pages. Too thick to put both in the same drawer. If you put one in the drawer where the other belonged, and the other where you forgot it... you see where I'm going. Back in the day, if for some reason you weren't at home when the (only) phone company came by to drop them off, you were stuck with last year's version unless you went down to the central office God knows where but probably a building that looked like a mausoleum. There was nothing wrong with last year's version, where you had written crucial information in the margins, or over the blue pages that listed government offices you never looked at once but seemed important enough to someone to put at the front of the book. Every year you lost those notes. Your old girlfriend's number you had underlined or page ripped out. Then when the new ones came, you had to discard the old ones, heavy enough if you lived in a big city to worry about their edges ripping the garbage bag.
Also, the telephone directory gave you insight, as it did me, how many people are named "Smith". And how hard it was to find the Smith you wanted, even if you knew the address. In an AP report today, Syracuse pop culture professor Robert Thompson said, "Anybody who doesn't have access to some kind of online way to look things up now is probably too old to be able to read the print in the white pages anyway." I'm so old I can remember when the ink on the phone book pages rubbed off on your fingers. I'll bet there are fifty Thompson's in Syracuse.
Finally, the phone companies were allowed to drop off new directories on your door step, or, in piles in front of office buildings. What was the world coming to? Well the world is coming around to getting rid of phone books altogether which is what I read on the internet version of our local newspaper that I get for free. Remember how the advertisement in the yellow pages used to subsidize the white pages? It always used to bother me that the category "car rentals" wasn't under "autos", but listed under "rentals". What was that all about? Was the decision made by committee? Was there any name that had more entries than "Smith"? So many questions that are so useless today.
I can still remember my childhood telephone number. I remember looking it up in the white pages in my hometown where we were the only family so signified. And how when I went to hotels in bigger cities, there was always reliably a telephone book in the drawer next to the bed (empty, now, even of Bibles) where I could wonder at identical names of others. Now I have more important things to do. Now I can google images and see them all faster than I could look my own name up in a phone book if I had one.
I do not mourn the passing of the telephone directory. These days I am glad my children need me for anything. So I will take their phone calls and do their searches. Not too long ago, when I was in the middle of a very crucial paragraph, I snapped at my youngest, "Go find a phone book." "What's a phone book?" he replied laconically. On reconsideration, I want to talk to him at any time of day or night. Phone books can go to hell. Unless the internet goes down. Meanwhile, all those printing presses no longer churning out pages from trees? They're printing dollar bills.
"What's a dollar bill?" my great grandchildren will ask my children long after I'm gone. I already have their answer, "Once upon a time they were worth a hundred cents." Now I just need a place to write it down.
8 comments:
Of course, today's white pages are nearly useles due to the plethora of unpublished numbers and cellular-only households. There are also so many variant yellow pages dropped on my porch throughout the year that I fear for the forests felled to print books I'll never open.
Good essay, and one that resonates with me, too.
Business owners are at a crossroads. Do we continue to pay large fees to advertise, or skip the yellow pages altogether and spend the money to have our websites "googled"? We can count the hits to our site, but have no idea the payoff for the yellow pages. There is also an extra fee to have our website included in the yellow page ad. In this economy, advertising dollars have to be spent wisely.
tom
This is about how families connect. It is our generation that has to adopt to the electronic/computer age or we left in the past isolated from the generations to come.
The transition is already here. I think they should stop printing the yellow and white pages. The internet is preferable as it is faster, and provides more needed information such as street maps from where you are to the location, aerial photos, and opinions of others about the products or services rendered by the company. And on top of all of this, requires no storage space. It is sort of like a lot of other things in our society, like beepers, typewriters, record players and 45 single records. Soon it will be landline telephones, yellow and white page books, and many other things. Their time has come and gone.
Dad???????
I am very sad to see the yellow pages go. My daughter has spent several years moving up and now it is almost over. As you can see for every bit of happy news here is some sad news.
Years ago I worked for a company with a facility that printed the Yellow Pages for California. I could not see from one end of the warehouse to the other. It was that huge, and they printed them year-round. I also learned they printed yellow ink on white paper. The pages don't start yellow. So now the guy who makes yellow ink is kaput and the Merced plant is surely closed. This is Progress. Later, as a newspaper publisher I competed against seasonal infestations of Yellow Page salesvultures, who would rape local merchants and leave. They, too, are gone. Now someone buys a database...and voila, instant Yellow Pages. Where are the jobs? Where is the manufacturing? Trees like it. Lumbermen don't. Upstream, this is a probably a microcosm of much more that is happening in the US. (Except for the part about trees.) Electronic yellow pages are a big convenience (IF you're wired: I still have a copy in back of my car). But with all these people out of work--thank you technology-- who will have the dough to buy all the stuff in all those stores?
...many moons ago, a few weeks after a divorce and needing a job badly, I applied to work for the Yellow Pages, in sales....and was not hired... thank God!!
My rejection made me go into another direction, and am today financially set.
Good bye Yellow Pages... you are now obsolete.
I never was able to figure out why you had to pay the phone company NOT to put your name in the phone book. Except for offices, the hard-wired telephone is passe.
Post a Comment