I came home to find two new phone books sitting on my steps, just a few feet away from my recycling bin… which I guess was convenient, because the recycling bin was where I immediately tossed them.
What a waste. I mean honestly… who the hell still uses a phone book for anything more than an improvised booster seat anymore? And what the hell does it take to get Dex and their competitors to stop dumping their trash on my doorstep?
Phonebooks? Communications anachronism. Call Dex to get their automatic delivery halted and save a few trees in the process. I stopped the dumping of 40 phone books that got piled up under my row of mailboxes serving 40 households by calling their missed delivery number.
I collect them so I’ll have enough for a dry fire backstop. http://www.corneredcat.com/practice/backstop.aspx
A dying business just like the printed newspaper business.
What is really sad is that the phone book companies could have got in the game a long time ago. They should have moved on and created reliable and effective localized online directories and search that weren’t actually a waste of time. They could have done it. But unfortunately, they just seem to be in the business of pissing people off with their overweight dead tree edition.
Sure now there is Dex Knows online service. But what about 8 years ago when it could have mattered. They had all the local business contacts. The database was theirs. They could have made a really lucrative local search business and built brand loyalty when it mattered and when it was still possible.
Still, it’s nice to have a reliable phone book when the other crap doesn’t work.
Good information is neutral about where it can be found. Your imagination is the limit — and quite a limit it is.
The research skills I learned using the Dewey Decimal syatem have made navigating the Internet seem like childplay. Why throw away a free resource?
You can prop your computer monitor on top of it — if you are tall enough to need that. See what I mean about information? Now I know you guys are short.
I used the QWEST phone book. The copy cats are usually pretty useless.
Rep. Geoff Simpson tried a couple years back to run a bill to allow people to put themselves on a sort of “do not deliver” list for phone book publishers. But, like most great ideas in Olympia, it went nowhere.
Don’t be such a stuffed shirt, Goldy! Distributing phone books provides temp employment for homeless people. It also keeps a few dozen guys with chain saws working in the woods. After 30 years of union busting and job outsourcing by cheap labor conservatives it’s one of the few featherbedding gigs left.
@2 “If you dry fire a handgun in your home, you will need to be prepared in case your gun loads itself when you are not looking.”
Yeah, you really gotta watch out for that, guns can be crafty. Especially the ones with stupid or careless owners. Btw I was taught to never dry-fire a gun. It’s bad for the mechanism. If you don’t have enough phone books you can always use a Republican.*
* Just kidding! Bad Coulter joke. Really bad. But I think liberals must arm, because the guys who go around saying they want to kill liberals are arming like crazy, and they might not be kidding.
@3 “But what about 8 years ago when it could have mattered.”
Unfortunately they didn’t have anyone on staff with the know-how and the guy they wanted to hire was still 8 years away from graduating from high school.
@4 What would you know about “good information”? Your head can’t find the exit from your own ass.
I do still use phone books. I have a land line and I’m not always within range of a computer. I take the magnets off the front and recycle everything but quest’s though.
When they give me an update I throw the old ones into the recycle bin. It would be great if they’d print them on 100% recycled paper.
I think an actual phone book yellow pages are easier to use than the on-line version. It’s way easier to browse. Plus my phone book never gets a virus and betrays me.
@7…RR…
Stupid rabbit…once again ralphing on subjects about which you are profoundly ignorant…
Phone books are printed on groundwood directory paper, which is a specie of newsprint. Modern newsprint has a recyled content of anywhere from 10 to 40 percent.
In addition, the beloved cap and tax bill passed by the House will kill over 36,000 jobs in the US paper industry by the year 2035. These are mostly union (PACE and the AWPPW), family-wage level, basic manufacturing jobs, the kind you and your ideological fellow travellors rant and rave about losing.
Well, you’re losing them because you’re killing them. But then again, you have no idea what I’m talking about since you buried yourself in a dead-end government job your whole career.
But to the hard working men and women who are papermachine tenders, digester cooks, broke hustlers, process engineers, tour foremen, product development scientists, and more it’s a pretty big damn deal.
Yet all you have for them are snarky and quite elitest “featherbedding” comments?
Hypocrite. You have no idea what working men and women in America do because you’ve never been among them. In fact, you are the ultimate anti-labor, anti-worker, anti-family intellectual thug who supports politicians and policies who kill their jobs, kill their industry, kill their way of life and standard of living just to feel smug about their sophistication and “progressive” superiority.
All this makes you the ultimate union buster.
To borrow Joseph Welch’s words, “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
The Piper
My 90 year old parents who don’t have a computer…and they still read the newspaper, too.
Sometimes there are power failures where one cannot consult his or her computer for a telephone number. Phones often work when the power is out because it’s electrical system is DC and separate from the AC power grid.
When the power’s out and one needs to make a call, it’s handy to still have a phone book.
We have cut back on expenses, and one of the things that got cut was hi speed DSL.
We have reverted back to using the phone book when it would take too long to find the number by booting up the computer and using dial up.
Like #15, it’s nice to have a back up, a “safety net” when all that high falutin technology goes out.
And you ever used Dex Know to find a business? It’s a worthless app. Google will find the number 95% of the time, Dex Know only about 40%. Sad.
Stretching the topic to it’s absolute limits….
The WSU newspaper, the Daily Evergreen, is cutting down on wasted paper by publishing a fill-in-the-blank form to use when WSU athletes are arrested. Considering the number of arrests/suspensions etc., it should save a lot of time as well. It’s pretty funny.
“_____” is an embarrasment to WSU Football”
Yes. Frequently.
@13 pipersqeak
I was a sixth hand in a paper mill when you were fecklessly wrestling unsuccessfully with wheezy plumbing. You think you speak for me, buffoon?
Goldy the elitist..
“What a waste. I mean honestly… who the hell still uses a phone book for anything more than an improvised booster seat anymore?”
What about all the poor folks who can’t afford internet service? What about the many in the “greatest generation” that don’t use computers….?
How un-progressive of you….
219…X…
And that’s as far up the progression ladder that you could get??? What did you do – get fired or something? AWP or PACE?
The Piper
Screw ’em. They’re all republicans. Limited intelligence, obviously.
@22…X…
Wow! What incissive analysis and informative answers to my questions.
How’s life in the intellectual lugger bucket?
The Piper
22. hey, I’m not a republican and I use the phone book!
That kind of talk just makes you look stupid. Let’s have the progressive voices be better, leave the name calling to the conservatives.
@13 I would merely point out that if what you say about 36,000 paper industry jobs is true — and I never take for granted that anything a wingnut says is true — that’s still less than 8% of the jobs lost last month alone to incompetent Republican economic policies.
@13 “Hypocrite. You have no idea what working men and women in America do because you’ve never been among them. In fact, you are the ultimate anti-labor, anti-worker, anti-family intellectual thug who supports politicians and policies who kill their jobs, kill their industry, kill their way of life and standard of living just to feel smug about their sophistication and “progressive” superiority. All this makes you the ultimate union buster. To borrow Joseph Welch’s words, ‘You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?'”
Nice rant. Bullshit, but better-crafted bullshit than we usually get from trolls around here.
I’m anti-work, not anti-worker, but of course your feeble intellect doesn’t make such fine distinctions.
To understand why I’m anti-work, you must ask yourself who workers work for. Cheap labor conservatives, that’s who! They get all the money, and workers get all the work. They tax workers’ wages 3 times as much as they tax their own capital gains and dividends, and a thousand times as much as they tax inheritances ($3,000 worker exemption versus $3,000,000 estate exemption). Why would anyone work under a system like that? I don’t. I’m a capitalist now. Don’t you want everyone to be capitalists, Pooper? Or are you anti-capitalist, too? Are you a fucking closet commie? Not accusing, just asking.
@23 “incissive”
Like most Republicans, this one can’t spell, or proofread, or whatever.
@25 If you follow the link at this sentence of Piper’s @13,
you’ll find that it goes to the Heritage Foundation site. There’s not a single “fact” presented on that page, just results of “calculations” with no supporting data whatsofuckingever. And yet Piper presents this link as somehow being proof that 36,000 jobs will be lost.
Such bullshit, Piper.
@24 “leave the name calling to the conservatives”
What for? Why should they have all the fun? Why should we let them have a monopoly on name-calling? Or anything else? Conservatives want a monopoly on every fucking thing! Me, I want to live like a Republican! For more information, call 1-900-ROG-CASH. All proceeds go to the Help Roger Rabbit Live Like A Republican Fund.
re 13: If RR was for saving the jobs you would state that he was stupid, uninformed, and a neo-Luddite.
That’s why your comments are useless. You are not the loyal opposition, you are just opposition.
I’ll bet you have an oppositional disorder.
To digress, and talk about phone books…
Carry one in your car, recycle the rest.
they shouldn’t deliver that paper pollution to your home without asking. It’s trespass and a nuisance. I recommend a class action law suit with the remedy being to cut off the heads of anyone who likes phone books, and place their skulls in a large pile outside the town walls. Because a law chaning how we view phone books would inevitably lead to communism, and labor camps for all the right wing troll. I have just one question:
when can we get started?