The Yellow Peril
By Ron Newman - Tue, 03/18/2008 - 9:08am.
The Globe finally weighs in on a topic very familiar to UHub readers: the wasteful free distribution of 4-pound phone books, by two competing companies.
Earlier:
When phone books attack
Yellow onslaught
Yellow Book: The annoying phone directory
Big fat yellow books on the stoop
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Globe forgets what blogs are again
A few blocks away, 33-year-old Jason Muth vented his disgust in his blog.
Um, link? In this case, you can't even find his blog easily on Google, because he doesn't use his last name there (you can, however, find his LinkedIn page).
He is sanguine, because the important thing is that the issue get out there, but sheesh.
Or as Riggs in Boston puts it:
My Sanguinity
Wow, I've never been called sanguine. I like that one!
You'd bloody well better like it!
But the op-ed page knows what blogs are
Look at the right column of today's op-ed page. A whole list of quotes from local blogs. Didn't you use to do something like this for the Globe?
Yep
Only in City Weekly, though.
Riddle me this?
Why does a single-family house in a neighborhood of single-family houses receive three identical phone books in a single bag?
The nearest multi-family dwelling is 1/2 mile away.
Guess
My guess is that the distributor is being paid per book distributed. It's either your porch or the dumpster, and they're less likely to get busted for dumping on your porch.
Remember when the phone company owned all of your phones?
Once upon a time, the phone company owned all of the telephones in your house, and you could only rent them. Later, you could own your own phones, but you still had to tell the phone company how many extensions you had. The phone company delivered as many phone books as you had extensions.
Perhaps they're still using these very outdated records?
I remember that
I remember moving to a town where private citizens didn't own their phones and having Ma Bell try to repossess our phone, which they felt was illegal contraband.
Three Wire Thingies on Wall
Bingo!
There were three extensions in the house at one time. I forgot about that.
We used to have one of the old retired rotary phones up in the playroom, because little fingers were unlikely to be able to dial China by just playing around.
We still have a Bell System wall-mounted rotary phone
In the kitchen. It would be quite the effective deterrent against any intruder if only we could get it off the wall in time ...
Talking Phone Book
The one that really annoys me is something called the Talking Phone Book. It's just a phone book with no audio features, and its name makes no sense.
Haven't seen that one in years
Is it still around? The 'talking' gimmick was that each display ad contained a 4 or 5-digit code. You could call a toll-free number that was prominently printed on the directory's front cover, then punch in the code to learn more about the business.