If the phone company stops printing and delivering residential white pages, as Verizon has asked regulators permission to do in New York and New Jersey, what am I going to use as a doorstop, or to raise my computer monitor an extra 3 or 4 inches?
On the one hand, Verizon’s request makes sense. The company says it could save 5,000 tons of paper every year by halting delivery of the white pages in New York alone. And besides, let’s admit it: most of us stopped using the white pages to look up residential phone numbers a long time ago. These days, we either look up the number online, or call directory assistance and have them dial the number for us.
Fact is, I don’t use the yellow pages either — and I don’t think I’m unique in that regard. But the phone company isn’t talking about getting rid of business listings, because it sells those, and I’m sure it doesn’t want to cut off such a lucrative revenue stream.
Still, you have to wonder how they’re going to convince business customers of the value of paying for a yellow pages listing, when the company admits the white pages listings are about as useful as 8-track tape players.
That, as they say in the business, is going to be a marketing challenge.
About the only revenue Verizon will lose by getting rid of the white pages are the fees they charge people who don’t want their numbers listed. That never made sense to me anyway. Why would it cost extra to have your number unlisted and out of the phone book? That makes about as much sense as charging airline passengers extra for luggage they carry on themselves. Oh, wait; some of the airlines are doing that now.
Because I’m a green sort of guy, though, I absolutely support this proposal to save paper. From almost any perspective, printing and delivering a new, humongous, phone book to every customer every year is a colossal waste of resources.
Back when I was at the newspaper office every day, the phone company would deliver the new phone books on a skid that weighed close to a ton. Then, the lady who delivered the company mail would spend a day lugging them to every person who had a phone — and that person would promptly put the new phone book in a bottom desk drawer and forget about it.
When the desk drawers got too full, we’d do a company-wide collection and fill up several of those huge rolling tubs for recycling. And then we’d pay a guy to get rid of about 5,000 phone books that had never been used.
As I said, a colossal waste of time and resources, especially when you figure that the same thing was happening in nearly every business and residence using landlines.
So if the phone company is successful in its request to stop delivering the useless things, what is it going to do with all the money it saves?
Is it going to pass the savings on to residential customers in the form of reduced monthly bills?
It’s funny, but nobody at the phone company has mentioned that as a possibility.
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I am going to keep one phone book around, however. Like many residents of the state, I’ve been plagued by brown marmorated stink bugs. The bugs aren’t native to the state, having hitched a ride here from Asia, and have no natural predators. Even birds and other bugs, like the enormous spiders that live on my property (we found one in the shed so huge and scary my son went after it with a spear), are apparently grossed out by the noxious odor they emit when squashed, cornered, or simply don’t like the way you’re looking at them. I know from experience why nothing eats them. One of these bugs crawled into a can of peanuts I was nibbling from recently, and I think you can imagine how that turned out.
They’re very hard to kill without smelling everything up, and I’m getting tired of them flying into my hair, slapping them out of reflex and then smelling like (expletive deleted) until the stink wears out (it’s almost impossible to wash it off). The smell, by the way, is sort of herbal, yet rancid, like concentrated, distilled, essence of cilantro (which I hate) mixed with old sweat socks.
If you accidentally suck one up in the vacuum cleaner, the house reeks for weeks every time you use the thing, and woe to anyone who steps on one with bare feet.
Maybe a light saber would kill them efficiently, but I seem to have misplaced mine. I’ve found, however, that if you drop an entire phone book on the bugs, and just let it sit on them until their bodies decompose into husks, it’s an effective extermination tool that has the added benefit of sending a message of warning to the hundreds of other stink bugs lurking around the house.
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And speaking of getting less for more (I was doing that before I got sidetracked by bugs), I was less than pleased last week at the news of the likely merger between Continental and United Airlines, a $3.2 billion deal that would create the largest airline company in the world. The new company would be called United.
That merger has serious implications for New Jersey, and future passengers.
Continental (for my money the only airline flying these days that still treats passengers like human beings) controls 70 percent of the passenger traffic at Newark Liberty International Airport, and the company employs about 14,000 people in this state, which makes it one of New Jersey’s largest private employers.
How much will change once the merger takes place is unclear, but the people who track such things in Trenton have got to be concerned.
And what about passengers? Does anyone think that the creation of this mega-airline will mean lower fares? Or will it just mean higher prices, fewer perks, and fees for everything from a glass of water to using the bathroom to evacuate the water you’ve just paid to consume?
I think we all know how that’s gonna shake down.
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].