March 10, 2009

The Fine Art of Delivering Phone Books

My new phone book arrived the other day, delivered directly into the bushes by the front door. It was in a plastic bag, but it was jammed in crooked and the twist tie was not properly attached.

I was appalled! As a trained professional, it was almost painful to witness such shoddy work.

You see, at one (brief) point in my (not so brief) working life I was myself a phone book delivery guy. Of course, it’s been something like 35 years since I served on the front lines of the Battle For Handy And Reliable Home And Business Directory Information, and maybe the standards have fallen since then.

I joined the proud ranks of phone book deliverers during one of several times in my life when I was a little on the light side of completely broke, and I wanted to buy a birthday present for my wife. When I read the Help Wanted ad in the newspaper that said I could earn as much as three dollars an hour if I was a reliable self-starter, I literally dove for the phone.

The first thing I had to do was fill out an application, which made me a little bit nervous. I mean, what if I failed to measure up to the high standards of the service fraternity I was trying to join? Fortunately, the toughest questions on the form were, “Do you have your own car?” and, “Have you ever served time in a federal prison?”

Before long I received a letter telling me that my application had been accepted (the answers were “yes” and “no, respectively), and that I was to show up at an Orientation Meeting in a small conference room at the Holiday Inn. It would be a sort of basic training program for me and a group of my fellow hopefuls, an opportunity to learn the finer points of the trade.

The first thing we did was watch a short film, with a title something like, “So You Want To Deliver Phone Books.” It dealt with our vital role in the telecommunications industry, and our solemn obligation to each and every one of the citizens on our routes.

It turns out we were expected to knock on every door and personally hand the phone book to the recipient. If nobody was home, we were to leave a note on the door and try again later. After three attempts, we were instructed to carefully bag the book and leave it inside the storm door.

For each book delivered this way, we were to be paid eleven cents.

The film also provided us with a list of dramatically illustrated “Do’s and Don’ts.” The most memorable vignette involved a woman actor wearing a housecoat and hair curlers, opening the door to a clean-cut and innocent young Deliverer, standing on the porch with a fresh new phone book in hand.

When our sultry domestic siren made a transparent (and fairly nauseating) attempt to lure the young professional into her lair, he firmly and politely refused, handed her the book with a confident smile and strode off into the sunset.

After the film, I took a good look around at my fellow Knights of the Phone Book. Hoping to make a good impression on my new employers, I had come to our training session wearing a sport coat and tie. I was a little out of sync with my colleagues on that point, since the accepted uniform leaned more toward white “wife beater” tank tops. Of course, this made it easy to determine that I was also the only one there who did not have at least one tattoo.

The next step was picking our routes. Each route consisted of about 200 addresses, and so was worth about $22. The official advice for all the new deliverers was to take one or maybe two routes, just to get the hang of it. Then, if everything went well, we could always come back for more.

Always rational and cautious, I went ahead and signed up for 10 routes.

Next week, The Bearer Of The Books

Copyright ©2009 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.