Phone books and me

Phone books are cool.

Telephone directories and I go back a long way together. I remember that when I was growing up in the early '80s, the local Yellow Pages began including street maps. I hoped someday I'd grow up to get a job correcting the maps (which the maps they included at the time sorely needed). But when I saw the words "Since 1907" under the Reuben H. Donnelly logo, I began to worry that Mr. Donnelly might be no longer alive to hire me to work on the maps.

I don't know if any of you remember the Yellow Pages at the time including a drawing of a woman with orange hair holding one of the maps, but these illustrations were legendary then - and subject to extensive defacement by many a customer.

I don't think ol' Reuben had anything to do with the White Pages, but if he did, Reub and I had something big in store for the area in the late '80s! It was then that I began posting the Cincinnati area White Pages on a local BBS. It worked wonders for post counts!

I skipped the preface of the directory that listed consumer rights and phone harassment penalties, and went right to the listings. The listings were the meat and potatoes of the tome, after all.

My uproarious endeavor was bolstered in 1991 when the Supreme Court ruled in Feist v. Rural that phone companies cannot enforce a copyright on listings.

In 1998, I finally got a chance to work in the phone book biz. I got a job bipping about Highland Heights delivering the directories. That year, the phone company test-marketed a miniature replica of the White Pages - featuring all the same listings, but in much smaller print. The phone company decided to give some of the houses in my territory a miniature book instead of the big book. But when the townsfolk protested by asking for a big directory, I defied the phone company's Allowed Cloud by giving them one.

Phone books also make dandy collateral to use against hotel chains. Once on a trip in Pennsylvania, I confiscated a motel room's phone book as leverage because the inn's swimming pool was out of service.

Now it's June! Where I come from, we call June phone book month. What does this year's run of directories have in store for the Great Royal Tim? Who knows? Life can be full of surprises, especially when phone books are involved.