ONCE A YEAR in Dublin, they arrive in pairs, like animals from Noah’s Ark. And in common with some of the beasts that the Bible tells us found a space on the Ark, phone books now appear to be heading for extinction.
Traditionally, two phone books arrive at your front door in the capital, one with business and residential numbers for the 01 area, the other a listings directory, the Golden Pages. They still arrive annually – the bane of home-owners away on holiday as irrefutable evidence of non-occupancy – but with each passing year, the sound of their thud is quieter and more apologetic as the books continue to shrink in size.
All over Ireland, phone books listing landline numbers are decreasing in bulk. In a country where a large percentage of the population now owns a mobile phone, fewer people are choosing to have landlines in their homes, especially if they don’t run any kind of business from home. And if you do want to find a landline number, either in your area or around the country, you can go online and look for it at the Eircom website.
The Irish Times is meant to be a paperless office, but of course it is not. Among the mounds of newspapers, reports, notebooks, books, letters and documents that are piled up on every surface are the slabs of paper that are phone books. The older ones, dating back to the last century, are as dog-eared and tattered as a child’s most favoured night-time storybook. The newer ones are pristine, for the simple reason that I, for one, cannot remember the last time I needed to consult a paper phone book. I just look the numbers up online.
In 2008, the 01 phone book was more than 1,100 pages long. This year, it is under 800. Although undoubtedly some people still consult the phone book for landline numbers, statistics can only be heading in one direction. There will almost certainly be a time in the near future when there won’t be any printed phone books at all, and really, given the staggering amount of paper involved annually in creating them, it’s hard to feel any nostalgia or regret at this thought.
Ironically, when I tried to contact Eircom to talk about the future of printed phone books, I could not find the correct number online to call. I got lost in an on-hold labyrinth of options and disembodied voices that confused me so thoroughly I ended up putting the phone down without ever finding the information I wanted. Perhaps I should have consulted an actual phone book – if I could only remember how to use it.
