benshead

We receive new phonebooks at least once a year, even though we aren’t customers of any traditional phone company. I suspect that phonebooks are so ad-driven that it will take more than the extinction of landlines or the hegemony of online search to kill them.

In our house, we have had an annual, serialized conversation that goes something like this:

Spouse #1: Why do we still keep phonebooks in our living space? Do we ever use them?

Spouse #2: Sure I use phonebooks! We need to have them available in case.

#1: In case of what, the suspension of the internet?

#2: There are some things that are easier to look up in a phonebook.

#1: Like what? Anyway, they take up too much space.

This conversation can go on forever.

But I was pretty sure that neither of us ever used phonebooks (oops, did I just betray the identities of spouses #1 and #2?), so I decided to try a small experiment.

I placed a single piece of tape across the edge of the two phonebooks opposite the spines, put them back on the shelf and promptly forgot about it.

It’s now a year later and some new phonebooks just showed up on our porch. As I went to grab the old ones from the shelf, I remembered my experiment and wondered what the results were.

It was as I’d expected, the tape had not been disturbed, indicating that no one had looked in the phonebooks or even tried to remove one from the shelf. Now, they’re all in the recycling bin. If only I could cancel the future delivery of them…