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2010-01-19

The Phone Book is not going down without a fight

SEATTLE, Washington - I got a few more phone books deposited on my stoop last week, bringing to seven the number of phone books I have that are officially "current" (i.e. labeled as being good until June 2010 or all of 2010).

And I tossed a few phone books out last year, so it's possible that if I had checked dates before disposing of (er, recycling) them, I'd have more than seven current ones.

My landline is from Qwest, so I guess I expect a few Dex books, but I have no relationship at all with Verizon yet they deliver three phone books to me. I guess enough people are still putting ads in big yellow phone books to make it economically viable to print and distribute them.

The oddest thing of all - the White Pages. Not only is this useless, but if you think about it a bit it creeps you out - "here's a big book full of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of everyone in the city!" And nowadays, it's not even close to being everyone, it's just older people who haven't abandoned landlines and didn't have the sense to tell the phone company to exclude them from the book.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's even creepier, when you call Verizon to request that they do NOT deliver you any more books, they want to know why. And you find they have no box on their form for "I don't want it.'
After that, several days later, a Verizon rep will call you to ask 'Are you sure you do not want our directory?"
I'm sure that next year, more Verizon directories will show up on my porch.
Oh, BTW, for Qwest customers, that 'non-published' service costs you $.75 per month.