Today my wife, my kids,  and I were out shopping.  During our outing, I had to refer to a yellow pages at a gas station.  Fortunately I was able to find the entry of the store which I had been looking for.  (Ironically -but not related to this article- the address in the book was wrong)

This experience reminded me of something that I have seen in movies.  Often, one will see a character refer to a phone book at some point in a movie or TV show.  Once that person finds a place that he is looking for, he tears the page out of the phone book, and proceeds to his destination.  Granted, this makes for a dramatic scene in a movie; but it is a severe inconvenience for the general public.

There have been a few times in my life where I have noticed that pages have been missing from a public phone book.  Restaurants and movie theater entries are notoriously missing.  That is really frustrating!

There are many instances where people copy things that they see on TV and in movies, but the practice of tearing out phone book pages should really stop.  Regardless of who did what in a movie, it isn't cool, plus it is vandalism!