MARILYN CORNWELL: July 11 2023 - Where is the phone book?

I went looking for a person's address yesterday. I tried 411.ca - it remains our phone book but it is a truly diminished reference source. That's because phone books were listings of telephone service subscribers. And land lines are less common now.

Phone books have been around since the late 1870s in the US - books listed the inhabitants of places. That was how we found out how to contact people and businesses for the 20th century - until the arrival of the internet and smartphones in the 21st century.

So how do we find someone's address today? There are fee for service sites and these are mostly US services. TruthFinder is such an example. BeenVerified is the same. Infotracer allows country searches so I gave it a try. but my contact was listed in North Vancouver and Port Hawkesbury (Nova Scotia) and not Niagara-on-the-Lake. These are the same places I would have looked - linkedin, facebook and a general search.

My guess is that older people have fallen off the directory services. Many people my age have a loathing for facebook and instagram, and didn't use linkedin for professional listings.

And the phone book today? Here's its status:

I asked my kid for a phone book. They rolled their eyes and said "OK boomer, we don't use those anymore" and handed me their phone.

Now their phone is smashed and they are furious, but I got that spider!

That's the joke! In the 50 jokes about the phone book, it takes up 40 variations. OK, except for this one:

Beat your kids with a phone book.They won’t even know what hit them!

Here's more of the Fun Run on our street(s).