Play The I Memorized The White Pages With Your Kids - It'll Flip Em Out.

Subtitled: The Harold Halff Memorial Thread.

Oddly enough, I don’t see this on Google.

After reading Shirley Ujest’s New and Improved Amusing Names! ( Now 20% more laughs) thread in in this forum, I was reminded of the first bar I ever hung out in; a former brothel & rum running joint on Baldwin Canal called Mike’s Harbor Inn. The place was fun. Just a bunch of semi-retired clam diggers who sat around all day telling stories, singing and drinking large quantities of alcohol.

Anyway, there was a customer there named Harold Halff who would screw with the occasional new customer who’d walk in:

He’d have the barmaid grab the White Pages from behind the bar & ask her to put it in front of the person. He’d strike up a conversation and then ask them to get a bar napkin, write down 3 digits, with the first number being larger than the last. Then he’d have them reverse the numbers and subtract that reversed # from the original.

With me so far? (Example 874 - 478 = 396)

He’d then ask the person to go to that page in the phone book & in the far left column, count down the number of names of the last digit of the answer (in the example above: 6).

Then he’d have them write down the name listed and the phone # and ask them to pass the book to him.

He’d ask a bunch of meaningless questions (such as what’s the last 3 digits of your phone #, the 1st letter of your mother’s maiden name, what day were you born, how many children in your family, etc, etc, etc) and two very important questions mixed in between all the jibberish:
What is the first letter of the name you wrote on the napkin?
and
How many listings did you count down from the top left of the page you went to?
Old Harold was pretty slick:
Knowing that the middle number was always going to be a 9
and
Knowing the first letter of the last name gave him a range of pages (A = Pg 0-100, B=Pg 101-211, etc)
and
Being told the last number of the answer
He was able to figure out what the original number was, get the correct page number and the name and phone number the customer had written down.

It’s kinda simple, if you practice it once or twice with a phone book at home, you’ll see how easy it is figure out. If you have any curious kids in the house - or nieces and nephews for that matter, give it a shot. It’s all but guarantted to amaze them, especially when you keep insisting you memorized the entire directory. To this day, twice a year, whenever a new set of phone books are delivered, my daughters tell me, ‘Dad, you have to study the new book they threw in the driveway’.