Short Stuff: Phone Books

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry, Dave, let's go nostalgic.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:10)
That's right. I mean, there's a slew of websites you use to research this, but I mean, honestly, we could just say from our own brains, because there wasn't a lot in here that like we just didn't know as growing up in the time that we grow up again, because this is about phone books.
And if you're of a certain age, you know exactly what we're talking about. And if you're not of a certain age yet, you might be surprised to know that at a certain point in time, if you wanted to, I don't know, take your car to the shop or find a florist or a dry cleaner, you couldn't just go on the internet to do that or whip out your phone, you would bring out a 17-pound book that was eight inches thick, drop it on your kitchen table and wake up your entire family on a Saturday morning, and you would start letting your, well, I'm not going to say it, you would start thumbing through that thing, looking under the florist section or the laundromat section to find a business to give your money to.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:10)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:10)
It's very cute.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:11)
That is how you found businesses, it's how you found people too, because the business part was in the second half of the phone book, it was all in yellow pages. The first part was white pages, and those were residential listings.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:24)
Yeah, or they were two different books entirely.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:26)
It could be, if you lived in a fancy pants area, like Westchester or something like that.
Yeah.
The white pages, this is another thing. The reason I love doing this one, Chuck, is because this is to me the first time we can be like, you have grown up in a world where you can't really understand the world that this thing existed in and shaped. This is a great example of it. And one of the things that stuck out to me was explaining the white pages where you could go and say, I'm looking for Charles W. Chuck Bryant. So I'm going to go to the B's of the white pages and start looking through the Bryant's until I find all the Charles. And I know Chuck lives in Atlanta, so I'm going to find Chuck's address in Atlanta. And then at the end of that is Chuck's phone number, and I'm going to pick up my phone and dial the numbers that is in this publicly available book. Maybe even I'll get tired of waiting for him to answer. I'll hang up and just drive to his house, which I now know exactly where it is, because his address is listed under his full name with his phone number in the phone book, along with everybody else in town.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:37)
Yeah, and you would just knock on my door if you wanted to speak to me. And I know that we were sending a large number of our listeners into a complete and utter panic at the thought of someone knocking on their door just to pop in and say hello or whatever.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:50)
Just think about how much the world has changed in that respect.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:55)
Oh yeah, you don't even call someone anymore without texting them to say, can I call right now?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:58)
I know.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:59)
It's very strange.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:00)
It is. This is a different world.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:03)
It was a totally different world.
The, well, you know, another funny tangent to that is, I also remember a day where if you were like, let's say you knew someone's name, but you didn't really know where they lived and you didn't know them that well, you needed their phone number, so you looked it up and there were like six Josh Clarks. And you would start calling random Josh Clarks and say, are you the Josh Clark that I met at camp, summer camp this summer? Or the parents of? So like, you would go, like, you know, that's the whole plot of The Initial Terminators. He's killing random Sarah Connors.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:38)
Oh, yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:40)
Because he looks up Sarah Connor in the phone book.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:42)
Yeah, but you would totally do that. I did that too. I mean, like, you would do something like that and it was accepted.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:49)
It would be like, oh, that's a different guy. Sorry.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:51)
Yeah, good luck.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:52)
Good luck.
Oh, man, so quaint. And this was not like 300 years ago. The other thing I did not know, actually, when I said I knew all this in my brain, and it totally makes sense now, all this, you know, the businesses themselves were advertised within the floral section or the laundromat section. And that's why you would see, like, A1 Plumber or A1 Florist is because they would be listed first. I never knew that, and I feel like a dummy because it's so obvious.