The job: Yellow Pages Delivery Person

My age: 16

Hourly Wage: I can’t remember

Raise your hand if you even remember the Yellow Pages.

Back in the day, every house had a copy of the White Pages, and a Yellow Pages.

The White Pages listed everyone in your town and city and their phone number.

This is still wild to think about – you could call almost anyone you wanted right from the white pages.

You could cold call, anyone.

These days it’s hard to get numbers and finding someone’s cell phone number is not easy.

But, back in the days of land lines – yes, we used to have actual phones in our houses that were connected to the phone company through cables – everyone could get your number pretty easily through the White Pages.

But, I wasn’t delivering White Pages, I was delivering the Yellow Pages.

The Yellow Pages were a listing of all business in your area, town, city – and if you wanted to find something, you would ‘look it up in the Yellow Pages.’

Wanted to order some pizza? Look under pizza in the Yellow Pages.

Needed a plumber? House painted? Whatever you needed you would find in the Yellow Pages.

There were not readily available Google reviews, so finding pizza was a game of chance.

I think a new Yellow Pages would come out every year and the companies who printed them needed people to deliver those new editions to all the people in every town in the United States I assume.

So, when I was on sabbatical from high school during my junior year, I signed up to deliver the Yellow Pages.

I vaguely remember going to some warehouse in Chicago, getting a high level overview of what we were doing, being given 1,000’s of Yellow Pages, and a list of addresses to deliver them to.

So, after that riveting information session I loaded up my 1986 Jeep CJ-7 and drove back home. Once home I took out the 100’s of Yellow Pages (they each weighed a few pounds?) and then I had to put them each in a yellow plastic bag. This process took forever and I am sure I wondered why I had to do this part of the packaging.

After loading up all the Yellow Pages into their respective bags, I again loaded up the Jeep with all the cargo and headed to the streets I had to do the deliveries.

I stated dropping off the Yellow Pages one by one at each residence.

It quickly became so boring and not easy to do.

It was endless.

When I was ‘done’ I headed back to the warehouse to pick up more copies of the Yellow Pages and bags to put them in, and then started delivering them again and again.

This was well before airpods and apple watches – so I have no idea how many steps I got in, but I bet it was a lot.

I think this job went on for a few weeks and I do remember being paid in cash, but have no idea how much it really was.

The lesson learned for me here was how hard manual labor was. I was in good shape, 16 years old, and I was beat at the end of a day walking 30,000 steps and lifting heavy Yellow Pages over and over.

This was pushing me to go back to school and finish my education.

Sometimes in the age of ChatGPT and Gemini AI search, it’s almost hard to think about how much harder it was to find things you wanted – and how easy it is now.

I don’t think people deliver the Yellow Pages anymore, and let’s all take a moment to pour one out for the Yellow Pages.

Carpe Diem my friends!