The Blessings of Disaster by Michel Bruneau

Author:Michel Bruneau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2022-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

ON THE DISASTER TRAIL

Who Dominates the Yellow Pages: Where the Buck Stops

A Canadian friend who visited the University at Buffalo one day elected to stay in a hotel close to campus. When I saw him again the next morning, he asked me, “Do you happen to know which profession fills the largest number of pages in Buffalo’s Yellow Pages?” The University at Buffalo north campus is suburban, unlike many other universities in denser urban surroundings where tons of businesses and restaurants hug the campus boundaries; when someone has spent time counting pages in the Yellow Pages, you know there is no life around the University at Buffalo campus. For the benefit of the younger generation that has never owned or seen a landline phone in private homes, the Yellow Pages was a massive book that “Ma Bell”67 gave every customer and that contained the phone numbers of all businesses in the area, grouped by types of business. It was so thick that ripping the phone book in half was a stunt performed by some as a show of strength. The book went the way of the dinosaurs, but some can still be seen in the Smithsonian’s museum or in black-and-white gangster movies as a useful tool to beat suspects during police interrogations.

It turns out that my friend had counted the number of pages filled by medical doctors, engineers, car repair shops, insurance brokers, pharmacies, and every other group that had a sizeable number of pages, but the one group that had more pages than everybody else, and by a factor of two over the nearest contender, was lawyers. To top it all, there were also ads for law firms on the back-cover page, on the inside of the cover page, the inside of the back-cover page, and—as no space was wasted—on the thick spine of the book itself.

When the “Someone Else’s Fault” syndrome rules the day, there is apparently money to be made.

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