Lessons from New Zealand's good book; the Yellow Pages

Wednesday, 6 October 2021

The new Wellington Yellow Pages has listings from 18,000 local businesses. You can also use the book to shore up the wobbly table.

OPINION: Every few days I do a sad trip out the door, down the path, and to the letterbox.

It’s sad because there’s never anything nice in the letterbox. At best there’s a flier from someone wanting to save my soul; at worst a white envelope addressed to someone also named Virginia Fallon, though I never open those. They don’t look friendly.

Last week was different. There, on top of the box, was that brightly coloured harbinger of spring: the Yellow Pages. It used to arrive at the doorstep, where the only better find could be a wrongly-delivered Uber Eats or Hello Fresh, but I care not where it’s delivered, I’m just happy it’s here.

It reminds me of good things, and we can always do with a bit of that.

Private equity firms don’t always come out on top in business deals, as the sale of the Yellow Pages for $2.2b in 2007 proved.

* It's Conservation Week, so let's get rid of the Yellow Pages

* Yellow directory business to attempt reboot

These days the arrival of the Yellow Pages is usually accompanied by criticism of its place in modern life, and especially its impact on the environment.

Yellow NZ distributes 2 million books nationwide, featuring listings from 154,000 businesses; nationally the book represents 1.2 per cent of total paper usage each year, a number that pales into comparison with the 80 per cent of paper usage currently occupying our bathroom cupboards as stockpiled loo roll.

And anyway, the books are made from forestry by-products, and are completely recyclable – not that any of that mattered in the 80s where my enduring love of the good book began.

Those were the days when the Yellow Pages were massive – at least six inches thick – and your whole town was listed between those sunny covers. As much as I like to tell younger people how outdoorsy and independent my generation was, the truth is we were bored stupid and the Big Yellow provided much-needed entertainment.

You’d see all sorts of things as you flicked through to find numbers for the video shop, radio station, or movie theatre. (Don’t pretend you didn’t know the chip shop number by heart.) There were maps you’d rip out to take on your bike rides, and even area codes for far-flung places like Auckland that seemed so exotic to small-town kids.

There was also plenty of salacious information in there too, and my group of friends spent many an afternoon leering and wondering over the adult listings. I once called an 0900 number to learn “how to seduce a woman”, but as my mum was unaware of my sapphic tendencies, my brother copped the blame.

Currently, my copy of the Yellow Pages sits on top of the microwave where it will stay until the next one arrives. It serves no purpose but neither does the cat and I still keep him about.

The good book is needed by plenty of people who let their fingers do the walking, but even for those of us who don’t, it’s a nice thing to have – something from the days when things were simpler and, yeah, happier.

Anyway, there's plenty of things you can do with the Yellow Pages. You can use them to prop open the door of the cupboard the cat likes to sleep in, or shore up a couch leg (rip them in half). You can use them to sit your laptop on, so nobody sees your chins on Zoom, or crush walnuts with. You can press a flower, start a fire, or write bad poetry in the blank spaces around the ads.

Or you can just keep them around because they remind you of being a kid looking up the number to beg the radio station to play your song.