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Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
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Telephone books are a heavy issue
WE HAVE roughly 842 pounds of telephone books at our house, causing the structure to list several degrees starboard.
There apparently is a savage competition among several warring tribes of telephone book producers who cause new stacks of books to materialize overnight around mailboxes on our street. Homeland Security should be notified. Terrorists wishing to leave an explosive device in front of someone's house need only to make it appear to be a couple of telephone books in a plastic bag. Those bags of books are universally ignored by residents for days.
The profusion of phone books raises a lot of questions, like, Is this profusion of telephone books caused by companies trying to provide a useful, needed service to people or by companies that just hate trees? I mean, there cannot possibly be enough trees in the United States' Strategic Tree Reserve to produce all of the telephone books being manufactured. We must be denuding vast stretches of China or Mongolia of trees to get enough raw material to make these phone books. Does an average household really need 842 pounds of phone books? Is there that much calling to be done? Do building codes need to be upgraded to deal with the extra stress on floor joists?
As I write this, my eye strays to my cellular phone, and I have an epiphany: The smaller cell phones get, the bigger telephone books get. One day, your cell phone will be nothing but a tiny implant in your ear, but your telephone book will take up an entire room of your house.
I WAS TOLD by an authoritative source that while it might seem that there are many, many telephone book makers, there are only three: Hawaiian Telcom, the Paradise Pages and the new kid on the tree-chopping block, Ad Ventures. I'm old-fashioned so I consider the phone book sent by the phone company the "official" phone book. I know this isn't fair to the other contenders because they are equally chock-full of names and numbers and, weightwise, their yellow pages can compete in a sumo ring with any other book.
Each telephone book has features that make it special, although what they are escapes me for the moment. I know the Paradise Pages have radio jocks Perry and Price on the back cover with a "lucky number" that enables you to win something or other if you hear it broadcast. Lucky numbers have never been lucky for me.
I think that most people would be happy with just one set of phone books (one white pages and one yellow pages), but we live in a free-market system and competition is important.
The "one phone book" concept, not surprisingly, is embraced by Hawaiian Telcom, the telephone company. Ron Montgomery, vice president of directories at Hawaiian Telcom, thinks one set of books would be just fine, and guess which one he thinks it should be?
I asked him whether there is even a need for paper phone books, considering that almost everyone has a computer now and the phone book could be reduced to electrons.
He pointed out that, as with daily newspapers, many people like to have both the hard copy in their hands and an online product. Being in a tree-killing business myself, he had me there. Happily, both newspapers and phone books are routinely recycled now, lessening everyone's guilt trip.
I pointed out that I use the 411 system a lot, for which he thanked me and pointed out that I was paying about a dollar per requested number. That caused me to have another epiphany: Quit using 411, you lazy idiot. Start building up your upper-body strength and pick up a phone book like everyone else.
ALL OF THE phone book makers offer Internet directory services. (Hawaiian Telcom at HTYellowpages.com; the Paradise Pages at theparadisepages.com and Ad Ventures at ad-venturespublishing.com). There are subtle differences in how they work. For instance, if you look up "Escorts" on the Hawaiian Telcom site, you see a big ad for "Hotties 4 U" while Paradise Pages offers "Strippers2Go" and Ad Ventures leads off with "A Blonde Affair." I suspect these aren't the kind of escorts you want if you need a date for your company's Christmas party.
"We're in a technological transition," Montgomery pointed out, which is a way of saying that the paper phone books aren't going anywhere soon. Or, as he put it, "not in my lifetime."
He sounded pretty young on the phone so I guess we'd all better start working on our upper-body strength.
Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail
cmemminger@starbulletin.com