Yellow Pages in Canberra. Your final use?

It’s a great ‘big book’ for a toddler, hours of fun leafing thorough & making up stories about the pictures in there! He hasn’t found the escort services yet tho…

They make good homemade firelighters, better than the free Canberra Crimes at Fyshwick Markets.

Then on the one one occasion I needed to look something up and I could only remember it started with F, I walked up to the Post Office and used their copy.

Well, my last copy was left on the very edge of our front steps – just outside the coverage of the eave.

I got home to find it soaked most of the way through after the early May rain. Suffice to say it didn’t make it’s way past the recycling bin.

Sometimes I find the alphabetical listings in the White Pages to be much more convenient than doing a search if I know the name of the person or business I wish to ring.

Unfortunately I have found the White Pages Online search facility to be flaky and to have difficulty figuring out which bits of Canberra are in “Canberra” and which bits are in “North Canberra”. I often have to try three variations of a place name in order to find what I am looking for, so a paper version of the White Pages or a Google search is generally more useful.

What would be nice is PDF versions of the various White Pages publications from different regions. Convenient for me, but it would be much harder to sell advertising in the PDFs than it is on the search facility, so I can’t see it happening…and I think the Australia Post staff might have a problem with me standing there all day scanning their copies of the White Pages.

PoQ said :

you can be reasonably certain … that the first two pages of results aren’t paid ads.

Um, you can be 100% certain that every result in the yellow pages is a paid ad.

But for my 2c, I opted out 2 years ago, still got it the last 2 times. Both times straight in the recycling.

My wife had to explain to our son after being asked “What is it and why are we getting it?”. I think it will replace the old one under our bedside phone cradle, until NBN rolls through and makes our phone redundant.

2620watcher said :

I tried this two years ago. And guess what? Like everything else Telstra touches, they screwed it up also. I have recieved the last two editions on my door step.

Telstra FAIL – Spread the word.

I signed up 18 months ago, and no yellow or white bricks so far. They made it as difficult as possible. Finding the website took a lot of work (no-one was there to point it out to me). Then, had to fill in a fairly comprehensive form first for the Yellow Pages, which ended with a CAPTCHA (one of those “type the text” human verifiers). Only problem was the first CAPTCHA I got was in some script from south Asia that was impossible to type on a western keyboard. When I refreshed, I had to fill the whole form again from scratch, and the next CAPTCHA (I kid you not) was in Hebrew! Filled in form again and finally got a legible and typrable text.

Had to repeat the entire exercise for the White Pages.

If I didn’t know Sensis’ IT skills, I would swear that it was engineered that way to make it difficult. I persisted because I was furious. Taking screenshots the whole time to send to them. Not that they care.

gasman said :

You can opt-out of the dead-tree version of both the Yellow and White Pages. Sensis makes it (deliberately?) difficult to find the link, but its here: http://www.directoryselect.com.au

If enough people opt out, it will no longer be financially viable for them to keep printing them.

So spread the word.

I tried this two years ago. And guess what? Like everything else Telstra touches, they screwed it up also. I have recieved the last two editions on my door step.

Telstra FAIL – Spread the word.

My mother in law (and a lot of others her age) don’t have smart phones or have internet at home. She uses the yellow and white pages. I keep the car sized version in the car to use the maps. I have GPS, but sometimes it just easier using a proper map to get around.

I still use the hard copy of the phone book. Its useful for looking stuff up without being traced – so if you’re looking for pregnancy kits or ball-joints for XY Falcons you’re not pestered endlessly; you can be reasonably certain that chunks of the search space haven’t been silently excluded; or that the first two pages of results aren’t paid ads.

And besides, you don’t need expensive hardware or a live internet connection to run it.