Phone Book Phenomenon

Once upon a time, but really just a couple days ago, I received a new phone book, the Orange Central Coast Yellowpages.

"But WormWranger PoopHarvester, there are three phone books in the image," you say. I find that baffling too because I stole only one. The third? It's a phone book phenomenon.

But each one came in a yellow bag that looked like this:

If you look carefully, you can see that it says,

"Please recycle your outdated phone books. Recycling information can be found at http://corporate.yellowbook.com/recycling/"

and that is pretty handy for folks who don't have worms or neighbor friends with worms.

A couple days before that, I had received another phone book. The Verizon Superpages.

"But WormWrangler PoopHarvester," you say, "there are two phone books in that image."

Of course there is, I stole that second phone book from my immediate neighbor.

What makes me scratch my head though is how I wound up with three of these phone books (with an ad for a DIVORCE lawyer emblazoned across the spine -- how uplifting). They're those on the bottom of the stack:

The other two were gifted to me by Lori, the neighbor in the next building. I don't steal from her. But I do have her boyfriend's cat. The third phone book? Another phone book phenomenon.

So these three phone books, the superpages, came in bags that say:

"To order directories or to stop delivery of this directory call 1-800-888-8448."

That's cool for folks who have the internet phone book and don't have worms or friends with worms yet.

Two months before this surge of phone books, I found a book of white pages in an orange bag outside when I was walking my neighbor's boyfriend's former cat, not in front of my door like those books above, but just inside the community gate, near my slider. Had I not been the Worm Wrangler, I would've ignored it.

But I picked it up.

And look at what was under the bag:

Go ahead and click the picture to check. It's a real $20!

I could've rushed out and bought

• 20 songs on iTunes (I didn't because I don't have a portable music playing device and use Pandora -- thanks Chuck!), or
• 6.5 gallons of gasoline (of course I bought gas but it was already in the budget), or
• the majority of The Les Halles Cookbook (I didn't because Amazon is unrelenting about selling entire books), or
• a box of golf balls (haven't lost all of the ones from my last box yet)

Instead that 20 sat on my desk here for quite some time. I think that was the Worm Wrangler above, making arrangements for me to score that balance.

The moral of the story? Start a worm bin of your own because then you'll tend to pick up phone books and there might be a $20 phenomenon underneath it.

And now I have a total of 12 phone books. Figure that out.

Really, the book was probably placed on top of the strategically located $20 for the resident drug dealer. But my phone book story is way cooler than that.