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Back then people weren’t so fixated on each other’s business. After 2001, that changed pretty dramatically
You could opt-out of those. And it was pretty reliable to do so.
Ok but your phone number wasnt in the yellow pages, that was for businesses. Your number woulda been listed in the white pages
And blue for government.
Uhhhhhh, no we weren’t. It cost extra to be unlisted, so most of us just lived with it. But there was a loophole. You could tell them what name you wanted listed, and they wouldn’t do any verification. I still get mail for “Rusty Shacklesord.” They misheard me when I got listed, and hell, I wasn’t going to correct them. Whenever I get a call or mail for Mr. Shacklesord, I know it’s bullshit and I can do whatever I want to the asshole.
I was very excited when my name, Johnson, Navin R appeared in the phone book. “Things are going to start happening to me now.”
My mom saves up all her junk mail, and takes it to a neighborhood shredding event 2 or 3 times a year. She gets distressed if she misses it. She doesn’t understand why I just toss it all away.
I’ve asked her why she thinks her junk mail address is so valuable, and she’s afraid they will fall into the wrong hands. I’ve explained to her that if it’s on junk mail, it’s already out there being sold. It’s just her name and address, it’s a public record.
I get why she’d want to shred stuff with her SS# on it, but another AARP solicitation?
I just gather it throughout the year and burn it in winter. Atleast i get some value from all the junk mail.
I had a close friend with a super long ranch home, with a big open basement under the entire thing. He collected old phone books from all of his friends and anywhere he could get them, and stacked up at the end, and we would target shoot pellet guns and .22s into them. They made a perfect backstop for light gauges like that.
He was also a jeweler, and had his jewelery bench down there, so I would hang out and keep him company while he worked, and I put in a LOT of shooting hours. Became a pretty good shot.
It doesn’t get much more American than a phone book hoarder’s indoor shooting range!
Be a good child now and buy your mom a shredder
She’s got one, but she thinks the trucks will shred better, and the shreds wont be in her trash where people will know where they came from.
I should note that my mother lives in a gated, active adult community, and there is literally ZERO crime in her neighborhood. If someone started going through someone else’s trash, you’d have a half a dozen busybodies demanding to know what you’re up to.
You have shredder trucks going through your neighbourhoods like mendicant tinkers??
3 big trucks, and three lanes of cars, pull up, pop the trunk, guy takes out the boxes and bags from the back and tosses them into bins, that are later emptied into the trucks, and you drive away.
And trust they really do pulp your papers without sifting through for the good stuff.
What even is this? Who is providing this service in the first place? This is weird, right? It’s not just me?
The Yellow and White Pages were a private business, and they sold the listings in the Yellow Pages, and also sold upgraded listings in the White Pages. Residential listings were free.
Then they’d drive around and drop them on peoples’ front steps. I knew people that made extra cash at Phone Book Delivery Season.
There were also competing Yellow Pages by upstart companies, especially smaller local Yellow Pages. You might have the big giant book that was the whole city/county, and then have a smaller set for just your suburb. A small local business might spring for an decent ad in the local Yellow Pages, and just put a simple listing on the big one.
I think you lost the thread
I’m in the habit of shredding everything.
a) It’s so fun to watch a stack of mailers turn into confetti
b) Deniability. If I only shred important documents, then all my shredded trash is now important. If I shred everything, nobody knows how much of it is important.
Mostly A though. I’m not yet worried about someone trying to reconstruct my shredded trash.
Very paranoid. I like it.
White Pages was home # listings. Yellow Pages was business listings.
For many cities they were the same book.
Same book, but still color separated with business in yellow and residential in white.
My city was big enough that we had to have two separate books, nyah, nyah.
So was mine. Lol. I’m just old enough that I got around and saw books from other places.
Fair enough. My hometown is densely populated.
All these damn kids all over the lawn.
Having just read the thread about commercial paper shredding, your comment took my mind to a weird place.
The yellow one was for businesses. Residential phone numbers and often addresses where in the white book.
Bess Motta was pretty hot.
All of this could’ve been avoided had Sarah asked her roommate to get phone line in her name.
Yes the terminator would have reached the end of the list and gone “Whelp, guess the humans outsmarted us again!” And just give up on the spot. Terminator are known for giving up at the slightest setback.
Exactly!
Samsonite! I was close.
(I know I know wrong movie, but it is another phone book scene at least)
Swanson
In smaller areas they’d make the yellow book and white book the same book to save on binding and distribution. I remember back in the very early 2000’s my rural county still got the 400+ page yellow pages delivered every year.
You used to make pretty good money being able to deliver the phone books too when they came out. It’s funny how people think the gig economy is new when we are doing everything we could to make money anyway possible. From delivering newspapers to phone books to door to door sales for advertising businesses in the phone book.
I think in the UK it was just yellow with “The Yellow Pages”, the actual name of the book itself and the company in charge of it. I know it eventually became just businesses but I’m sure it was more than that before the millennium. Now it’s just a business ratings website just called “Yell”.
Legitimate question, why do people keep typing “where” instead of “were”? Many typos are understandable where letters that are next to each other accidentally get swapped, but you have to go out of your way to put the h in there.
Autocorrect seems to have gotten noticably worse for me in recent years. I regularly find that the entirely correct words which I type out get changed to something completely different because the autocorrect decided that I couldn’t possibly mean that word. It regularly helpfully replaces entire words after I hit space and have moved on to the next. By that time, I’m usually focused on the next word, so slip-ups that I almost never make at a dumb keyboard (like its vs. it’s, there vs. their, your vs. you’re, or were vs. where vs. wear) happen with shocking regularity unless I proofread the entire comment. As a perfect example, I had to proofread and fix multiple instances of such while typing those examples.
I switched mine off a while back and even though I’m now fully responsible for my own terrible spelling and grammar, I’m pretty sure both have actually improved since.
They do it to annoy you. Just you.
I can’t speak for others, and I’m not sure I ever make that particular typo (espec swipe typing on phone), but I’ve noticed that I sometimes make typos that don’t particularly make sense to me… I’ll write a similar word that I would never actually confuse with the word I wanted…is not a homophone, is not a letter adjacency typo. I think the brain just works differently than we expect sometimes…
Probably they’re swiping on a phone keyboard and autocorrect fucked them, or they’re using text to speech and the diction fucked up and they didn’t proofread it.
If type like sound in head, where and were same. And type learned enough not think about every letter.
Came here to day this… Because I’m old.
Depends on where you are from I guess, there were many countries that used yellow pages for residential.
You were asked if you wanted to be listed or not.
Depends on the country.
In Australia you had to pay an extra fee to not be placed on there. Fuck you Telstra.Ditto in US. It was at least an opt out thing and referred to as getting an “unlisted number”, I can’t recall if there was a charge to do it.
I’ve never heard an Aussie say anything positive about Telstra.
Ditto for Canada
The reach of a printed phone book is obviously very limited, if compared to the globally accessibility of online data.
They already digitized the books and put them online in searchable databases 30 years ago.
Even including reverse number search (which my socially awkward self loved back then) and later integrated map routing to the address of the number’s owner.
So this argument doesn’t hold.
You seem to live in a USA-like country. In my country there are some figments of data protection, and the features you describe aren’t possible.
I am living in Germany, which has one of the stronger privacy protection laws.
But this was
a) more than 20 years ago
b) considered public data (distributed to every household in printed form any way), so the privacy laws of the time didn’t apply.The only legal disputes I remember were over questions of copyright for the entries in the phonebooks.
[Edit]
Just checked: at least one of the services still exists and works exactly as I described it before:
https://www.dasoertliche.de/
If you click on “Rückwärtssuche” you open the reverse search.
Here is a phone number to try it with: 0897003671
Note the “Routenplaner” link on the result entry, which shows you a map and lets you plan your route to the number owner.
Yes, but even then it was generally only true for the remaining fixed landline phones. Felt just like a public knowledge part of your address, like putting your name on the doorbell button.
To be generally valid for mobile phones you probably would have to go back another 10 years.
Those truely were different times still, also online.
I even remember posting my mail address to a public register at the end of the 90s to distribute the public part of my pgp key…It was fine to have my landline listed, because I didn’t have it with me in my pocket all day.
I would not want my cell number to be published. Mostly because I already get enough spam messages.
Let your fingers do the walking!
Back then I suspect the average person was a lot less likely to piss someone off who knew their name and was willing to target them
Unless your name was Sarah Connor, of course.
You’d think so, but then Facebook came around and people would write all sorts of crap with their names attached.
I had a cell phone and ditched my landline in 2003. Those weren’t listed. Gotta go back 3 more years! (For me anyway)
