Pluggers by Rick McKee for June 17, 2022

Know of anyone who still uses a phone book? this coming from Mr. Agnew’s fellow Washingtonian (I don’t think I’ll find my parents’ nor stepsisters’ numbers in a phone book for they have mobile phones and it never occurs to me mobile phones having their numbers in a phone book).

I don’t know about other parts of the country. Around here we don’t get phone books anymore. Just the yellow pages.

Sorry, phone books have gone the way of the dinosaur, and a stack of them weighs almost as much.

You’re a plugger if you remember phone books, perhaps.

The Google before there was Google.

I’m old enough to remember paying to keep our name and number out of the phone book.

No Pop-Up ads in Phone books …..

“the new phone books are. the new phone books are here. I’m somebody I’m somebody!!!”

I remember when I was a teen and I got my first phone line (landline) and my name was in “The Book”! :D

Ha. We gives up landline years ago.

“I’m somebody!” - Steve Martin (The Jerk)

You’re a plugger if you remember this joke was lifted from the movie The Jerk.

phone book? who’d read a book about phones?

I still get a basically yellow pages book dropped in yard. Believe me, it can come in handy when your power is out and you need to find a service nearby! Especially if your internet service is out and Google isn’t an option!

You’re a plugger if you HAVE a phone book.

Phone Book?? What is this you speak of!

Anyone remember “The Jerk”?

When I was growing up we didn’t have phone books. We had a telephone operator. When we wanted to call someone, we picked up the phone and told the operator either the person’s name or gave their 3-digit phone number. If we wanted to call someone out of the county, the operator would connect us to the long distance operator. There was a rotary dial on the phone, but we didn’t use it. In 1960, the state upgraded their phone system and we got our first phone books AND our first street signs and house numbers. We needed street addresses for the phone book (mailing addresses were PO Boxes). Our local phone numbers expanded to 7 digits, but we only needed to dial the last 5 locally. We lost our local telephone operator service, but we still had to dial O for the long distance operator because area codes weren’t yet a wide-spread thing.

Long time ago, I moved to SoCal and after the new phone book came out, I got a call from some guy with the same last name. Seems there are only about 100 of us in the country and he wanted to find out how we are related. I told him, I knew very little about the family, but he sent me a ream of paper with the family tree. I forwarded it to my youngest sister.

Phone book….hm….phone book. OH! You mean that great big thick yellow thing somebody keeps dropping on my doorstep every April and I never make it to the door fast enough to tell him to just drop it into the trash can for me so I don’t have to do it!

Did Steve Martin pop into anyone else’s head here?

Agnew? Thanks to Steve Martin and Carl Reiner as well!

Well, how’s it working out for you Steve? But then, you’ve always been a Happening kind of guy.

Our town is 150,000 folks, last phone book was about 1/2 inch thick.

Him and Navin Johnson. Pluggers.

Years ago in the seventies and eighties I used to go hunting in Idaho.At first, if you wanted to call “out of town” you went down on main streetto a single phone on a pole that connected out of town.There was one phone book for the whole state…That was 1970’s… Not 1870"s…

How many phone books now?…

When they did have phone books you had to pay extra for an unlisted phone number-phone book was the main source for telemarketers.

“The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!!!”

Hahahaha!!! Great movie reference!!

Phone books today a waste of a good tree. Information is wrong, incomplete, or non-existent.

If you don’t have one of those phone books in the house- what do you do when children come to visit who are too small to sit on a chair at the table? Didn’t they always exist to be used as a substitute high chair?

My sister came by with my niece for a quick visit and had not bothered to bring anything with her for niece to sit on – I pulled out the yellow pages and we wrapped a towel around niece and tied it in back of the back of the chair – instant high chair. (Niece is now in her 30s.)