On Phone Books & Other Obsolete Items

by admin | March 9, 2018 8:57 am

As we shivered our way into 2018, reveling in actual winter weather that is giving away to spring, I started thinking about all the items and services rendered obsolete in the past few years, at least for me. For example:

• Phone books. Print versions of phone books are rapidly becoming obsolete. For years, I have chunked the ones plopped in our driveway straight into the recycling can. If I need to find an address or phone number for a business or any other public entity — a courthouse office, for example — I go to Google. As fewer folks have land lines in their homes, the phone book has become largely irrelevant. If I am looking for a plumber or electrician, I search online, reading reviews posted by local folks, not the phone book.

[1]            Land lines are still needed for public institutions and businesses, such as universities and newspapers, but I’ll still find the number online. But a landline for the home? Nah. Our home hasn’t had one in a decade. I suspect this is true of many of you as well.

Also, it is no longer necessary to memorize phone numbers, which used to be one of my bragging rights. I still remember the phone number for our home at 27 Valley St. in Allenstown, N.H., the main line of the Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches, and the number for the Holiday Inn – Town Lake in Austin, where I have stayed at least a hundred times. But numbers accessed in the past decade or so are parked in the iPhone, freeing up a modest portion of my brain’s hard drive for other uses, such as remembering where I parked the car in the Big Box Store lot.

• Watching a series live on television. I know people still do this, scheduling that special hour on Tuesday nights for their show, but nobody that I know does that anymore. The rare exceptions for me are key sports events, such as the World Series or Super Bowl. Beyond that, we stream everything we watch, so watching television is on our schedule, not the networks or cable channels. This is a wonderful advancement that has made television something we actually enjoy watching for an hour or so each evening. Unfortunately, the recent decision by the Federal Communications Commission to end Internet neutrality poses a grave threat to both access and affordability. We’ll have to see how that plays out.
• Cutting articles out of the newspaper. My Beautiful Mystery Companion, who has a strong Luddite streak and keeps threatening to get a pay-as-you-go flip phone, still cuts out articles. The irony is that I’m the Old Newspaper Guy, and I just go find the link and save it, or print out the web version, since it is considerably neater and doesn’t have Joe Bob Bubba’s obituary on the back side of the clipping.
• Using a print dictionary. I have not used a physical dictionary in years. I go to dictionary.com or another online resource. I used to love looking up words in a dictionary. I am over it.
• Fax machines. I know that they are still used, but I have difficulty understanding why. For example, I have a scanning app on my phone that allows me to quickly scan and email as many pages as I wish. It cost me $9.99 in the app store and works quite well. Fax machines are going to go the way of the slide rule, I predict.
• Incandescent light bulbs. Energy efficient bulbs and a law passed in 2007 ensure these will by 2020 become obsolete. That is fine by me. Our home has a couple dozen recessed cam light fixtures. I started replacing them, first with fluorescent and now with LED. Sure, the initial cost is about three times higher, but the bulbs are supposed to last 10 years. And they come on immediately, unlike fluorescent bulbs. The LED bulbs will doubtless outlast our time in this house.

That is my list of what is obsolete in my daily life. No telling what technological advances in 2018 will render other once-popular items obsolete. Progress marches on, I suppose.

Source URL: https://garyborders.com/pages/on-phone-books-other-obsolete-items/

---