Archive for the ‘Reference’ Category

The phone company dropped off this year’s new white pages a couple of weeks ago. They were about two inches thick, and apparently the delivery service came by after hours. So they were waiting on the doorstep when the tenants of my building arrived.

In part out of a sense of obligation (I used to work for the phone company), I adopted one of these orphan doorstops, and I counted the ones remaining. I made a conscious decision to leave the others and see how much demand there was for the old paper product. Apparently, there was none. They lay there for two weeks before I finally gathered them up and headed for the recycling bin.

The delivery of the new phone directories used to be a big deal. The newspapers wrote stories about them. People immediately snatched them up to make sure their numbers were correct. My guess is that there are three factors in the rampant disinterest in the phone book these days:

• Size/clumsiness. Sure, you’re screwed if the Internet connection goes down, but I can look up 10 numbers on Switchboard.com in the time it takes me to even find the paper phone book.
• Lack of immediacy. In a world where we expect everything to be updated hourly, the idea of an annual reference seems almost quaint. In practice, I doubt it matters much, but it’s a mental thing.
• The wireless factor. I have two grown children, neither of whom has a wireline phone. The phone book doesn’t cover cell phones. Increasingly, that makes it irrelevant. This isn’t a “paper versus online” problem. But it is a very real issue. Until pretty recently, the phone book (or its online analog) was how you found people. With more people ditching their wirelines, that’s no longer possible. Maybe that’s the point.