So what’s the use of these things? One may ask. As far as I can figure out, there are two uses for these things. The first use is to do a free phone number lookup for someone. Let’s say you know a Mr. Smith who lives down your street whom you smile with every day while you do your morning jogging. How do you know he is Mr. Smith? Because you see his name on the letter box or something. He looks like a real gentlemen and you are thinking of making friends with him. Whenever you do this morning jog, you’re busy and he’s busy let’s say getting ready to go to work, so you won’t get a chance to talk to him directly. So what would you do? You want to give him a telephone call and invite him for a cup of coffee on a Saturday afternoon. But how can you find his phone number be it a cell phone number or a land phone number? Provided you want to find his land phone number (AT&T, SBC, Comcast, Bell) and not the cellular phone number (because you cannot do a cell phone number lookup as these mobile number are often unlisted numbers on telephone directories) this is when the telephone directory comes into play.

You would turn the phone book to letter ‘S’, then find where ‘Smith’ is. And because Smith is a relatively common name, you’ll find 100s of Smiths in there. But because you know the street that he lives in (because you live on the same street) and you know his house number (because you see it when you jog every moning), you can narrow down your Mr. Smith out of everybody else. You find out it’s actually a Martin H. Smith that lives on 4502, W Sidford Drive by looking at the phonebook. So you give him a call, introduce yourself, invite him for a cup of tea on Sunday. There you go, that’s the main use of a telephone directory as far as I can figure out. This was also like a people search by address in addition to the phone number search.