The Yellow Pages

One day a number of years ago when I was still working I was trying to locate a company. I went to a receptionist who was a very nice person and asked where do we keep our yellow pages. She said I don't know what you mean by yellow pages? I explained what they were. She said we do not have that type of book. She then asked me what would I do with this yellow page book. I explained what I was trying to find. She said what you want to do is Google the company. I asked what Google meant and she explained it to me. I suddenly had the feeling I might be starting to look like a dinosaur.

This past week I went to the Somerset Mall. I have not been to the mall for at least five years. I first stopped going to the mall during the covid scare. During that period I discovered another way to shop. A person can make purchases with their phone and buy from something called Amazon. These Amazon people will deliver the merchandise to your front door. One no longer has to go to the mall. Another big change like Google replacing the yellow pages.

I decided to go to the mall because my dog recently chewed and damaged my iPhone charging cable. I had to be near the mall for another reason so I thought I would visit and go to the Apple Store in person even though I could have bought through amazon. The people at the Apple Store were very nice and helpful. I purchased a cable I needed. While I was in the store I decided to ask a couple questions about my iPhone that had been bothering me. To me the problem I thought I was having with my phone seemed complicated. To the young person helping me it seemed like nothing and it was fixed in less than 30 seconds.

Now that I am retired I use Google every day to find information and answer questions. In recent years since being retired I discovered something else. Something called youtube. I watch it everyday. It can be watched 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform. YouTube was founded by three former employees of something called PayPal in 2005. The founders sold the company a year later for almost 2 billion dollars (that's a lot of money). The buyer and current owner of YouTube was none other than our old friend google. I think I may have learned more by watching YouTube and researching things on Google in recent years than I did during all the years I went to school.

YouTube serves most of the world. They had total revenue of about $50 billion dollars from advertising and subscriptions (that is also a lot of money) in 2024. They had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users in 2024. Collectively those viewers watched 1 billion hours of video every day. I like youtube. I watch a wide variety of videos every day - they may be educational, motivational, entertaining and a lot more to put it mildly!

Here's the moral of the story. We are not getting any younger. Life goes forward not backward. Things are changing constantly at a very rapid pace. In order for one to keep their mind working, stay relevant and not seem like a dinosaur you should not ignore things and embrace them. Forget the way we used to do it and the ‘good old days’ routine. Live in the present and think about the future. 

Most of all, don't ever ask anyone where The Yellow Pages are kept!