I was talking to a coworker about these new phishing attacks that send your name and address and sometimes a picture of your house, and I was saying how creepy it is, and they told me that phonebooks used to have like literally everyone in a city listed by last name with their phone number and address. Is that for real?
Charles Bukowski wrote maybe the most beautiful paean to the fact of the telephone book:
MegaUltraChicken@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Mid 30s and I feel ancient right now.
wallybeavis@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Mid 40s, and I too feel old now - at first I thought OP was setting us up for a joke. The local phone company still delivered phone books to everyone in my city until a few years ago.
I think it was an old legal requirement for any phone company providing landline services to also provide phonebooks. Unfortunately most weren’t even recycled, they were either burned in backyard firepits, or just thrown out
radix@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
You want to feel really old?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok
WoahWoah@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
No joke! I don’t know if I’ve ever actually seen a phone book. How would they even fit? Seems like they would have been enormous.
I did see a payphone in a restaurant once but it didn’t work. I saw another one outside of a gas station on a road trip in the south. That one had a dial tone, but I think you had to pay more to call anyone we knew, so we just took selfies pretending to use it.
altima_neo@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Yeah we were still getting them up to line 2010 or so, even though we haven’t had a land line active in my house since I moved in.
Fosheze@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Not even 30 and I feel ancient right now.
Anyolduser@lemmynsfw.com 15 minutes ago
Yeah, OP might just be a dumbass.