Phone Books

Claire Thompson asks:

When was the last time you looked up something in the phone book? What did you do the last time you got a free phone book dropped off on your doorstep—did you recycle it? If you’re like most people these days, your answers to those questions are probably “I don’t remember” and “No.”

Well, in my case the answer is “last year” and “yes” — the latter because we all have recycling bins in my neighborhood, so pretty much everything gets recycled with no effort on my part.

But I certainly don’t use phone books much.  In fact, even that time last year wasn’t for my own benefit.  It was for my Korean neighbor, who knocked on our door late one night and told us he’d locked himself out of his house and could he please use our phonebook to find a locksmith?  So I called a few locksmiths for him.  (And, along the way, learned that most “24-hour locksmiths” are anything but.)

The really mysterious part of all this, though, is that despite the fact that phone books seem like they ought to be a dying breed, there are more of them than ever.  I just looked, and we have not one, not two, not three, but four different yellow pages directories.  One from Verizon, one from Yellowbook, and two from AT&T (they come in two different sizes for some reason).  They’re all crammed with ads, which must mean people are using them, but I do sort of wonder who that is sometimes.  I use the web almost exclusively for this kind of thing these days, and I imagine that most people in my upscale neighborhood do too.  So why all the phone books?