Modern technology has pushed what used to be one of the most frequently used items in any home - the telephone book - to the brink of extinction (well, at least to the brink of irrelevance.
Although most kids born in the last 10 years don’t realize it, much of our daily lives used to revolve around that raggedy old book with all the names and numbers in the front and those weird-looking “yellow pages” over in the back. If we needed to find an old friend’s phone number or “search” for a local plumber, we pulled out “the book” and let our fingers do the walking. And trust me, if they had a telephone, and back then some people didn’t, you were virtually guaranteed to find them listed.
But my, how things have changed. These days if you’re one of the few who still use the phone book, good luck finding someone’s name and number listed in it. Years of being interrupted by telemarketers at dinner time and the ever-present prank calls by the kids down the road led most folks to request unlisted numbers soon after those “features” became available. Of course all of those unlisted numbers made the printed phone book pretty much useless for its primary purpose, so fewer and fewer people kept using it. Today, most folks just keep one around to look up a business in the yellow pages on occasion.
But now even the yellow pages are becoming more irrelevant as each day passes by. Need to find a dentist in Macon, Georgia? Simply do a Google search for “Macon, Ga Dentists” (substitute your own town or city) and you’ll immediately be presented with a long list from which to choose, complete with phone numbers, addresses and even maps to their locations!
Want to find the phone number for a friend who lives in another state? Well, you can if their number is “listed”. Simply visit one of the many popular “Whitepages” websites, type in your friend’s name along with the city and state in which he/she lives, and you’re in business. Several “matches” might come up if your friend has a common name, but all you have to do is call everyone on the list until your friend answers the phone (you do have free long distance on your cell phone, right?).
Back when I was growing up it was a big deal when the new phone book showed up in the mail each year. Some folks would spend hours leafing through it just to find out which of their friends and neighbors had gotten a phone (remember, not every household had one back then) and to see if there were any new business listings in the yellow pages. Those days are now gone. Homes with land-line telephones are becoming fewer every day, and cell phone numbers aren’t listed in “the book” at all. And with fewer businesses all the time paying for an expensive ad in the increasingly irrelevant yellow pages, the reasons for keeping a phone book on the shelf at all have pretty much evaporated.
What got me thinking about all this was the shiny red phone book that arrived in the mail the other day. We haven’t had a land-line telephone for years so we haven’t been receiving phone books, but for some reason we got one the other day. I guess the phone company just wanted us to have one for old time’s sake. Thanks CenturyLink!!
So true.