Government overreach! Next thing you know they'll make everybody's address and phone number public. And then send it out as a book to everyone. And then make a list of all the businesses in the area by category, and then print all of THEIR addresses and phone numbers, and send THAT to everyone.
My wife is the person in charge of the education department for the history museum for our city (110k residents). She gets tons of class visits from K-12th grade and has a whole thing she does about Old and New and shows them how to use phone books which most have never seen.
There’s a whole bunch of things like this that used to exist that are just not needed anymore. Extended business ads in the back of comic books, books with internet directories in them, etc.
You just flashed me back to a brief period in my life in the mid-‘90s when I designed probably a dozen of these things. The business model… did NOT pan out.
You just flashed me back to a brief period in my life in the mid-‘90s when I designed probably a dozen of these things. The business model… did NOT pan out.
I saw a post on TikTok in which some young person was positively AGHAST at the notion that there was a time when phone numbers and street addresses were published for just, like, anyone to see.
My wife and I have a ten-year age gap, and she was absolutely horrified to discover that I'd given permission to our synagogue and our kids' school to include our contact info in their directories. To me, it was completely normal; to her, it was akin to self-doxxing.
Very cool that we've created an environment of fear through social media where up to 100 million Americans can decide to hunt you down because of a post you made
We've gone from "never give any personal info out on the Internet, it might be dangerous" to "post every detail of your life online, but never give any personal info out to your own community, it might be dangerous" in a shockingly short time span
It used to be normal to quote people in the paper by giving their address as well as their name. When my dad was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune in 1945 he got a ton of letters afterward.
I remember my folks being pretty pissed that the local paper printed my grandmother's full address in my grandfather's obituary back in the early 90s. "Let's just advertise that she's an old lady living by herself so she can get burgled," they said, or something to that effect. They had a point.
I recall something in the paper *about houses that had just been burgled* where it gave the addresses and some details about what had been stolen. (This was 1960s - I was looking up something else in the newspaper archive recently and ran across it.)
I get mailed two each year and just toss them, which is unfortunate bc I actually right now need someone’s number but can’t get it online even tho they’re in the phone book hahah
One of them comes from the public power district (not sure why) and the other…I think it’s some joint business venture since that’s the one that is plastered on both covers with local ads. But both have both white and yellow pages.
My daughter got very upset when her all-girl high school printed and handed out directories for the families of all the students. She called it a stalker book. This was in 2014
You should have seen her face when I told her about phone books.
I see why they made it though, that's good useful information. What if you wanted to know all the pipe fitters because you had a big public works project coming up? Just a more innocent time, like who would use this information for evil
I was mailed a "The _Real_ Yellow Pages" by Verizon... and in this house we only have cell phones.
TBF, the yellow pages were always paid advertisement space anyway. And it's much thinner than I remember it being when I was younger.
And, like all Toilet Paper USA employees, she's not very bright.
But then, tiny-faced fuckwit Charlie Kirk doesn't hire smart people, because they make him look even dumber in comparison.
