The yellow one was for businesses. Residential phone numbers and often addresses where in the white book.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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Samsonite! I was close.
(I know I know wrong movie, but it is another phone book scene at least)
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All of this could've been avoided had Sarah asked her roommate to get phone line in her name.
Yes the terminator would have reached the end of the list and gone "Whelp, guess the humans outsmarted us again!" And just give up on the spot. Terminator are known for giving up at the slightest setback.
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Bess Motta was pretty hot.
In smaller areas they'd make the yellow book and white book the same book to save on binding and distribution. I remember back in the very early 2000's my rural county still got the 400+ page yellow pages delivered every year.
I think in the UK it was just yellow with "The Yellow Pages", the actual name of the book itself and the company in charge of it. I know it eventually became just businesses but I'm sure it was more than that before the millennium. Now it's just a business ratings website just called "Yell".
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Legitimate question, why do people keep typing "where" instead of "were"? Many typos are understandable where letters that are next to each other accidentally get swapped, but you have to go out of your way to put the h in there.
They do it to annoy you. Just you.
Autocorrect seems to have gotten noticably worse for me in recent years. I regularly find that the entirely correct words which I type out get changed to something completely different because the autocorrect decided that I couldn't possibly mean that word. It regularly helpfully replaces entire words after I hit space and have moved on to the next. By that time, I'm usually focused on the next word, so slip-ups that I almost never make at a dumb keyboard (like its vs. it's, there vs. their, your vs. you're, or were vs. where vs. wear) happen with shocking regularity unless I proofread the entire comment. As a perfect example, I had to proofread and fix multiple instances of such while typing those examples.
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Probably they’re swiping on a phone keyboard and autocorrect fucked them, or they’re using text to speech and the diction fucked up and they didn’t proofread it.
If type like sound in head, where and were same. And type learned enough not think about every letter.
I can't speak for others, and I'm not sure I ever make that particular typo (espec swipe typing on phone), but I've noticed that I sometimes make typos that don't particularly make sense to me... I'll write a similar word that I would never actually confuse with the word I wanted...is not a homophone, is not a letter adjacency typo. I think the brain just works differently than we expect sometimes...
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White Pages was home # listings. Yellow Pages was business listings.
For many cities they were the same book.
Same book, but still color separated with business in yellow and residential in white.
My city was big enough that we had to have two separate books, nyah, nyah.
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You were asked if you wanted to be listed or not.
Depends on the country.
In Australia you had to pay an extra fee to not be placed on there. Fuck you Telstra.
I've never heard an Aussie say anything positive about Telstra.
Ditto for Canada
Ditto in US. It was at least an opt out thing and referred to as getting an "unlisted number", I can't recall if there was a charge to do it.
Ok but your phone number wasnt in the yellow pages, that was for businesses. Your number woulda been listed in the white pages
And blue for government.
Uhhhhhh, no we weren't. It cost extra to be unlisted, so most of us just lived with it. But there was a loophole. You could tell them what name you wanted listed, and they wouldn't do any verification. I still get mail for "Rusty Shacklesord." They misheard me when I got listed, and hell, I wasn't going to correct them. Whenever I get a call or mail for Mr. Shacklesord, I know it's bullshit and I can do whatever I want to the asshole.
That name sounds like a Power Rangers villain.
Yes, but even then it was generally only true for the remaining fixed landline phones. Felt just like a public knowledge part of your address, like putting your name on the doorbell button.
To be generally valid for mobile phones you probably would have to go back another 10 years.
Those truely were different times still, also online.
I even remember posting my mail address to a public register at the end of the 90s to distribute the public part of my pgp key...
It was fine to have my landline listed, because I didn't have it with me in my pocket all day.
I would not want my cell number to be published. Mostly because I already get enough spam messages.
The yellow pages only had businesses. It was the big white book that had all the people's numbers in it. It also had addresses O.o
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The reach of a printed phone book is obviously very limited, if compared to the globally accessibility of online data.
They already digitized the books and put them online in searchable databases 30 years ago.
Even including reverse number search (which my socially awkward self loved back then) and later integrated map routing to the address of the number's owner.
So this argument doesn't hold.
You seem to live in a USA-like country. In my country there are some figments of data protection, and the features you describe aren’t possible.
I am living in Germany, which has one of the stronger privacy protection laws.
But this was
a) more than 20 years ago
b) considered public data (distributed to every household in printed form any way), so the privacy laws of the time didn't apply.
The only legal disputes I remember were over questions of copyright for the entries in the phonebooks.
[Edit]
Just checked: at least one of the services still exists and works exactly as I described it before:
https://www.dasoertliche.de/
If you click on "Rückwärtssuche" you open the reverse search.
Here is a phone number to try it with: 0897003671
Note the "Routenplaner" link on the result entry, which shows you a map and lets you plan your route to the number owner.
My mom saves up all her junk mail, and takes it to a neighborhood shredding event 2 or 3 times a year. She gets distressed if she misses it. She doesn't understand why I just toss it all away.
I've asked her why she thinks her junk mail address is so valuable, and she's afraid they will fall into the wrong hands. I've explained to her that if it's on junk mail, it's already out there being sold. It's just her name and address, it's a public record.
I get why she'd want to shred stuff with her SS# on it, but another AARP solicitation?
Be a good child now and buy your mom a shredder
She's got one, but she thinks the trucks will shred better, and the shreds wont be in her trash where people will know where they came from.
I should note that my mother lives in a gated, active adult community, and there is literally ZERO crime in her neighborhood. If someone started going through someone else's trash, you'd have a half a dozen busybodies demanding to know what you're up to.
You have shredder trucks going through your neighbourhoods like mendicant tinkers??
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I'm in the habit of shredding everything.
a) It's so fun to watch a stack of mailers turn into confetti
b) Deniability. If I only shred important documents, then all my shredded trash is now important. If I shred everything, nobody knows how much of it is important.
Mostly A though. I'm not yet worried about someone trying to reconstruct my shredded trash.
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I was very excited when my name, Johnson, Navin R appeared in the phone book. "Things are going to start happening to me now."
Back then people weren't so fixated on each other's business. After 2001, that changed pretty dramatically
You could opt-out of those. And it was pretty reliable to do so.
This. Ive known people that were just out of abusive relationships and kept their information hidden for that reason, including the white pages
Would they though? I think "kids today" are probably a lot less privacy conscious having grown up in an internet with social media and other privacy invasive technologies natively.
I had a cell phone and ditched my landline in 2003. Those weren’t listed. Gotta go back 3 more years! (For me anyway)
Let your fingers do the walking!
After I left one school to go to a vo-tech, I looked up the phone number for a girl I liked in the previous school who turned me down for a date. It was the only time I had ever asked a girl out. I had to go through 6 numbers before I found her, we ended up dating for three years.
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