Categories
Business fun stuff

It’s in the book

the phonebookphonebookGot home last night to find a brand new phonebook on the doorstep. Fair took me by surprise as I didn’t realise they still did them.

What struck me was the size of it. Tiny. Thinner than my index finger. I wondered whether this was because they didn’t have every Lincoln number in it but they must have because mine was there which scientifically proves everyone’s number is there. Presumably fewer businesses are advertising in it these days.

When Anne and I first bought a house together she sorted out the phone line. It was before we got married and when she filled out the entry for the telephone directory she quite naturally used her own name. This caused problems because nobody could find our number. They all expected it to be under my name – HT Davies. Even the H used to cause problems – many people don’t know that Tref is my middle name. We changed the entry the following year1.

In those days people actually used to use the phone book. The phrase “it’s in the book” was quite common. That was before people had their own mobile phones and before the internet. Nowadays not only do people rarely use the home phone line but the concept of looking up someone’s telephone number “in the book” is redundant.

If I need to call someone I will already have their mobile number in my mobile directory. If I don’t have that number then I will likely ask someone to text me so that I know where they are or I’ll drop them a line on Facebook or Twitter.

That’s all.

PS Some of you may think the photo would have been better positioned upright in portrait mode because you keep tilting your head to try and read it. It’s like that because this blog likes to push the boundaries and sometimes that is uncomfortable for people. Also the header pic is slightly out of focus – that’s either artistic or it’s because I couldn’t get it to focus that close up on the phone – you decide 🙂

1 that’s the last concession she ever had to make – I know who the boss is in our house 🙂

Categories
ecommerce End User

Yellow Pages shock

yellow pages - it's a percentages gameI realise it shouldn’t have come as a shock to me but one day over the long weekend I got home to find a copy of the Yellow Pages directory on the doorstep. It was a shadow of its former self, so much so that the notion of someone being strong enough to tear a telephone directory in half is now a pathetic anachronism.

It is extremely unlikely that it will ever be opened in our house. Even my wife, the least web/tech savvy of us all, would use the internet to look up services. You do have to ask yourself who is going to use it, or even who advertises in it. I guess they are still after the reasonably significant percentage of us that are not yet online. The size of the actual directory (click on header image for full shot so compare with car key – also it was only around 1cm thick) as a percentage of its former self probably reflects the percentage of people still offline.