The New Phone Book, part two

I came home from work last Friday to find sitting on my doorstep a copy of the new yellow pages, as well as a smaller copy of the county-only regional pages, which includes both the yellow AND white pages for the county alone. As I mentioned in a previous post, our local phone company is no longer delivering a city-wide white pages.

Anyway, as a result of this delivery, a couple of different things happened.

First, I was absolutely aghast to open the white pages of the county-wide book to find that my name, address, and phone number were in there! I've been living on my own for 20 years now, but this is the first time in my life that my name has appeared in a phone book. And unlike Steve Martin in the clip on the link above, I was NOT happy. I felt very naked knowing that someone could open up this book and instantly know my name AND where I live AND what my phone number is. I would think that identity thieves look forward to getting the new phone book the same way that little kids look forward to Christmas!

But after about a minute of being upset--and I WAS upset because I thought I was paying my local cable company for an unlisted number--I thought to myself, This is ridiculous. I voluntarily place on this blog TONS of information about myself, and I'm worried because someone knows where I live? If someone REALLY wanted to know where I live, they could figure it out by piecing together clues from this blog, and in addition to knowing that, they'd know my kids' names, my wife's name, how much I like milkshakes, what I was doing on September 11, and my problems with drug commercials, especially those involving Sally Field. All of this among many other things as well. There was no reason for me to get upset about being in the white pages!

The second thing I realized was what a waste these books are anyway. I mentioned this in my previous post at the top of this page, that they almost never get looked at, but this year my wife and I took things one step further. She was in the office working on something when I went into the bottom desk drawer, pulled out the old phone books, placed them in a plastic bag for the recyclers, and started to put the new phone books in their place.

"I didn't know we even still HAD those," she said to me. "You shouldn't even bother putting the new ones in there. I never look at them."

So we didn't. We placed both the old AND the new phone books back into the plastic bag the new ones came in and put them all out for the recyclers. We can get all of the information we ever used to get out of the phone books off of the Internet. It's more convenient and gets updated more than once a year.

Print isn't dead yet, but it's certainly dying.