I was talking to a coworker about these new phishing attacks that send your name and address and sometimes a picture of your house, and I was saying how creepy it is, and they told me that phonebooks were delivered to everyone and used to have like literally everyone in a city listed by last name with their phone number and address. Is that for real?
Yep, which allowed us to make great prank calls because people wouldn’t expect us to be calling them since they hadn’t given us their phone number. If someone had a popular name, like Miguel Rodriguez in Miami, you might have to make a few attempts to get the right one though.
Fun fact: Phone books are the reason there are some businesses called AAA. Businesses, such as locksmiths, plumbers, and other rarely used services, would name themselves AAA because it would make their listing first in the type/subject by alphabetical order.
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Same goes for a lot of generic-sounding “A” business names- Acme, Apex, Ajax, A+, American-whatever, etc.
Atari, Apple, Activision, Acclaim (all named to get ahead of each other in the phone book.)
How do you know these in particular were named for that reason and not just because the founders liked the name for any other reason?
Is joke.
Am oh
Acme has the added benefit of meaning “peak” so it could convey the connotation of being “best”
It was more than just the phone books. Back before smart phones, if you needed to look up a phone number you’d call information (411) and they’d look it up for you. For instance, if you were stuck on the side of the road and needed a tow truck.
Information would be able to look up businesses close to where you were using the NPA/NXX of the phone number you were calling from (the first six digits of the number including the area code) and then give you a couple options in alphabetical order.
I had a client who had a phone number in every exchange in NYC and had a name like “AAA Towing” so no matter where in NYC you called information for a tow truck from, they’d usually be the first option given to you.