# I miss old-fashioned phone books.
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [April 11, 2018, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224 "2018-04-11T16:19:42Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Spiderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spiderman)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/1 "2018-04-11T16:19:42Z")
My garage door spring broke.
Home Despot didn’t have any repair info online (put in your contact info & we’ll get back to you…maybe…sometime in the next week…or month) Lowe’s was no better.
Tried online yellowpages.
[ul]
[li]I clicked on the first one _after_ the ads; it was in Phoenix, AZ (despite putting in my zip code). [/li][li]The second one was the other side of the state. [/li][li]The third one had a real honest-to-Og street address in a nearby town. I looked it up; it was in the middle of the [del]mall[/del] Maul. Ummm, no.[/li][li]The fourth one mapped to a residential street; maybe it’s a home-based small-contractor. Nope, street view didn’t even show a garage at this house; nowhere to store the big pieces.[/li][/ul]
The old fashioned paper-based phone books were people who actually had real businesses remotely close to where you’re looking, not three time zones away, not just referral services.
They also had other uses, booster seats, mini stepstools, strongman contests, etc. ::Sigh:: _This_ is progress?
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### Author:  [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/2 "2018-04-11T16:35:15Z")
I know what you mean. It’s not as if the old yellow pages were free of advertising, they were all advertising, but at least you could be sure that pretty much every business would be listed under some category that made sense, and if you had the patience to check the addresses you could probably find one nearby.
So I hate to ask it, but did you try Google? I clicked on “garage door repair near me” and got a map with several garage repair businesses in my area. If I wanted reviews, Yelp is always (and I mean always) there.
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### Author:  [@Beckdawrek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beckdawrek)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/3 "2018-04-11T16:40:20Z")
Yea, it back to word-of-mouth advertising any more. I don’t use them but ‘Angies list’ is highly thought of. It’s worth a try.YMMV.
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### Author:  [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/4 "2018-04-11T16:45:05Z")
Garage door springs are not for the average do-it-yourselfer. You can get seriously injured with these things. It’s possible that you could research how to do it and get the parts and do it yourself, but I for one would not risk it.
Yes, there are times when I long for the days of Yellow Pages, but they’re gone forever. I doubt most businesses even list with them anymore. Like the buggy whip and VCR, they’re gone for good.
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### Author:  [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/5 "2018-04-11T16:52:02Z")
Agreeing that with “garage door repair” and my zip code, I get 3 ads from relevant and reputable businesses, followed by a Yelp list, then a variety of sites.
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### Author:  [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/6 "2018-04-11T17:07:00Z")
I still get phone books tossed at the end of my driveway every now and again. I leave them there until they erode into the landscape. Don’t they still litter other places with 'em?
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### Author:  [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/7 "2018-04-11T17:19:46Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#):
>
> I still get phone books tossed at the end of my driveway every now and again. I leave them there until they erode into the landscape. Don’t they still litter other places with 'em?
I still get them too, tossed right next to the mailbox. Luckily it’s usually in fall and I can kick it into the road and let the city pick it up with the leaves.
As a business, we haven’t put a paid ad in them in probably 15-20 years and instead focus that effort on facebook and twitter. A LOT more people come in to our store because of something online than we ever got from print advertising.
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### Author:  [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/8 "2018-04-11T18:57:38Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#):
>
> Garage door springs are not for the average do-it-yourselfer. You can get seriously injured with these things. It’s possible that you could research how to do it and get the parts and do it yourself, but I for one would not risk it.
It depends. The garage doors in my parents’ house are the type in which the springs are slack when the door is raised. So if you can prop up the door, you can swap out the spring when it’s not in tension. There’s another type of garage door in which, I believe, the spring is always under tension.
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/9 "2018-04-11T18:59:50Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#):
>
> I still get phone books tossed at the end of my driveway every now and again. I leave them there until they erode into the landscape. Don’t they still litter other places with 'em?
Yep. They go straight from my porch into the recycling bin.
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### Author:  [@Doctor\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doctor_Jackson)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/10 "2018-04-11T21:17:45Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#):
>
> The garage doors in my parents’ house are the type in which the springs are slack when the door is raised. So if you can prop up the door, you can swap out the spring when it’s not in tension.
Which is what the phone book is for. Depending on the size of your city, you may need more than one…
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### Author:  [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/11 "2018-04-11T22:56:44Z")
Several years ago one of our church officers casually mentioned “Oh… the phone book bill came and I signed for it”
?
I told him that Yellowbook or something similar had been mailing scammy fake bills to us for years, with all kinds of scary print like “Final notice” and so on. I just kept throwing them out.
But he fell for it and signed one of them :eek:
Sure enough, a couple of months later we received a bill for a few hundred dollars, complete with a copy of his signature printed directly on the bill–that sealed the deal for me, proving that they were expecting resistance and were operating in bad faith.
We kept ignoring the bills and nothing ever materialized from it. That was over ten years ago, so I hope it doesn’t come back to haunt us.
Anyway, crap like that is what remains of the fine trusted yellow pages we once knew. Ugh.
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2018, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/12 "2018-04-11T23:09:49Z")
> [@Doctor\_Jackson](#):
>
> Which is what the phone book is for. Depending on the size of your city, you may need more than one…
My dad used to use it for target practice in the basement. The Chicago phone books had really good stopping power on a .38. He’d stack them three deep, but I’m pretty sure a bullet never got past the end of the first one. (My memory is that they were about six inches thick or so back in the day.) Also, it would have been nice if he had told me he was about to go in the basement to show my mom how to shoot so I didn’t think bloody murder was going on in my house. 😉
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### Author:  [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2018, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/13 "2018-04-12T04:18:58Z")
In another life, my family’s business delivered 10% of all phone books published in the US. I finally left the fim in 2008. May have even posted a thread about it or two…
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### Author:  [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2018, 5:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/14 "2018-04-12T05:58:10Z")
> [@Roderick\_Femm](#):
>
> I clicked on “garage door repair near me” and got a map with several garage repair businesses in my area. If I wanted reviews, Yelp is always (and I mean always) there.
Yes, it’s possible to get the information the OP wants online; it just requires a certain art of searching.
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### Author:  [@EddyTeddyFreddy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EddyTeddyFreddy)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2018, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/15 "2018-04-12T06:23:17Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#):
>
> Like the buggy whip and VCR, they’re gone for good.
Nitpick: There are still plenty of buggy whips being [made and sold](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1&biw=1078&bih=451&tbm=shop&ei=cPnOWpKgLsT-jwS1wr7gCA&q=driving+whip+horse&oq=driving+whip+horse&gs_l=psy-ab.3...54972.56744.0.57150.6.6.0.0.0.0.92.494.6.6.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.0.0....0.BCpUprGwhHI). Also buggies, a/k/a carts and carriages.
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### Author:  [@snfaulkner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snfaulkner)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2018, 6:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/16 "2018-04-12T06:43:55Z")
I saw thread title and read the mouseover about broken garage door springs and immediately thought “oh, he must be using stacks of phone books to prop the door open”
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### Author:  [@anomalous1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/anomalous1)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2018, 7:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/17 "2018-04-12T07:32:58Z")
> [@pulykamell](#):
>
> My dad used to use it for target practice in the basement. The Chicago phone books had really good stopping power on a .38. He’d stack them three deep, but I’m pretty sure a bullet never got past the end of the first one. (My memory is that they were about six inches thick or so back in the day.) Also, it would have been nice if he had told me he was about to go in the basement to show my mom how to shoot so I didn’t think bloody murder was going on in my house. 😉
That sounds fun! He didn’t try to mask the sound? People just didn’t care? That’s awesome.
It makes wonder if some idiot had been running around with phone books taped to his person while committing a crime, looking like the guy on the cover of the Office Space DVD.
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### Author:  [@Sparky812](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sparky812)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2018, 12:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/18 "2018-04-12T12:03:11Z")
> [@Roderick\_Femm](#):
>
> I know what you mean. It’s not as if the old yellow pages were free of advertising, they were all advertising, but at least you could be sure that pretty much every business would be listed under some category that made sense, and if you had the patience to check the addresses you could probably find one nearby.
>
> So I hate to ask it, but did you try Google? I clicked on “garage door repair near me” and got a map with several garage repair businesses in my area. If I wanted reviews, Yelp is always (and I mean always) there.
Yep, same here.
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### Author:  [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2018, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/19 "2018-04-12T12:16:52Z")
Yeah, how are you supposed to tune up a suspect with an _app?_
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### Author:  [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2018, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-miss-old-fashioned-phone-books/812224/20 "2018-04-12T12:18:10Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#):
>
> It depends. The garage doors in my parents’ house are the type in which the springs are slack when the door is raised. So if you can prop up the door, you can swap out the spring when it’s not in tension. There’s another type of garage door in which, I believe, the spring is always under tension.
Right. If it’s like you parents’, you could get the Hulk to come over and lift the door and you could prop it open and replace a slack spring quite safely. If it’s a torsion spring, I’d leave it to someone who has done it before. But that’s just chickenshit me.
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