After I left one school to go to a vo-tech, I looked up the phone number for a girl I liked in the previous school who turned me down for a date. It was the only time I had ever asked a girl out. I had to go through 6 numbers before I found her, we ended up dating for three years.
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The yellow pages only had businesses. It was the big white book that had all the people's numbers in it. It also had addresses O.o
But you had to really watch out for the red and blue pages.... Bring me rrrred PAGES!
But not full names, only initial and surname
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.
That name sounds like a Power Rangers villain.
White Pages was home # listings. Yellow Pages was business listings.
For many cities they were the same book.
For small cities, large cities had multiple white pages books. A-F G-N O-Z for example.
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.
The yellow one was for businesses. Residential phone numbers and often addresses where in the white book.

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)
Bess Motta was pretty hot.
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.
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.
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.
Back then people weren't so fixated on each other's business. After 2001, that changed pretty dramatically
Would they though? I think "kids today" are probably a lot less privacy conscious having grown up in an internet with social media and other privacy invasive technologies natively.
You could opt-out of those. And it was pretty reliable to do so.
This. Ive known people that were just out of abusive relationships and kept their information hidden for that reason, including the white pages
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.
I've never heard an Aussie say anything positive about 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.
Ditto for Canada
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?
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.
wait lol, if she thinks her address is so valuable for strangers to steal, wouldn't that make tossing it somewhere other than home more risky? Not that there's much thought going into this routine.
You have shredder trucks going through your neighbourhoods like mendicant tinkers??
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.
The reach of a printed phone book is obviously very limited, if compared to the globally accessibility of online data.
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.