Do you keep a telephone directory on hand? Do you use it?

I use my phone book a lot. I’m distressed that they’re talking about discontinuing them. For local numbers, it’s much faster for me to look them up in the book, for the instance that you cited, faster. For the address of the restaurant I’m rushing off to, faster. Maybe that’s just my age talking, but I find the telephone book to be consistently more efficient to have on hand than the computer. And I’d much rather stand on the phone book to reach something than the computer.

I don’t use the phone book at all, and I do feel like the internet has made things better. Maybe it’s just because I spend a lot of time “researching” things, but I have become very adept at finding what I need online quickly. I once needed to find out if my accidental overdose was serious enough to go to the hospital and had no trouble finding the info I needed.

Yeah, I’ll bet you’re tall, huh… ;-)

I use it occasionally for things like “How to turn on call trace.” or “How to ignore non caller ID calls.” or “How to reprot a power or cable outage.”
Also there are many coupons – more than enough to last all year. Finally, I use pages from old phone books to start the fires in my wood burning stove. It stores neatly in the kindling section of the wood pile.

When I need phone numbers or addresses, I look it up online. But I always keep ye good ol’ phone book around and get it replaced every year; just in case. Ya never know, as you yourself have seen with that Clorox episode.

The Clorox episode was in about 1974, actually. I was just wondering how any present-day resource could have been better.

I also think we are taking a huge risk if we let ourselves be completely reliant on anything that plugs in. I can read the phone book even if there’s no power.

I don’t think there’s anything today, despite all the technology, that’s any better of a reference than a phone book for emergencies though.(at least homewise) They’re all conveniently placed right in the front in big ass letters, and can therefore be written on paper and placed by the phone or on the fridge, especially if you have kids.
The internet is swell, but it’s still not as convenient for stuff like that, and may actually be a bitch when it comes to local issues. Maybe someone’s poison center is not the same as the person in the next region, and typing in your city, state/province/whatever takes too much time if it’s really urgent. In my opinion anyways. I’m not so tech wise, maybe there’s some ultra I Pad thing somewhere that does something more constructive than whatever those do lol.

I do and I do use it. I like yellow pages to find services I might want, I like circling the number I need and turning the corner down. I’ll miss them when they go.

I keep whatever phone directory books are delivered to me, but I haven’t used any of them in over 5 years.

I keep them because even if I ingest something poisonous during a power outage, in most cases phone service will still be available, because in addition to commercial power, most telecommunications central offices have secondary and tertiary power supply systems.

I just called 411, and it took them about 10 seconds to give me the number for the Poison Control Center.