This photo was taken outside my apartment building a while back.
- Uninvited mountain of paper.
Every time a Yellow Pages appears outside my apartment door, I get a little sad.
It just seems so wasteful — using a whole brick of paper to print information I already have at my fingertips and plopping it, uninvited, at my doorstep. It’s like saying here’s your share of dead tree guilt! Enjoy!
On top of that, I didn’t sign up for it in the first place. I haven’t had a land line in years and I haven’t needed a phone book since I learned to spell Google.
(I mean, I enjoy a good tow truck or bail bondsman ad as much as the next guy, but I don’t need a 5-pound brick of them every 6 months.)
So I started wondering — can I unsubscribe from phone books like I unsubscribe from spammy newsletters?
And then I stacked the new phone book on top of the others next to my front door and went back to thinking about comic books, racquetball, gummy bears…
… until this article about a proposed city-administered phone book opt-out in Seattle renewed my interest in the subject.
Turns out you can, in fact, unsubscribe from phone book delivery by searching by area code.
So I did. Next time, that giant pile of pulp outside my apartment will be one phone book smaller.
