Editorial 1.2, February 1999, by Deirdre Helfferich An Ester Phone Directory Upon discovering that the phone company had changed my lsiting address from Ester to Fairbanks, I called up and changed my listing back to just plain "Ester," with no street address to confuse the phone book publisher. (Because a Fairbanks post office, rather than the Ester branch, has delivery duty to street addresses here, my street listing is in Fairbanks. Never mind that I get my mail at 99725 or that my house is situated in Ester: for the purposes of the directory publisher, I live in Fairbanks.) My experience with the phone company has convinced me that the people there are all pretty much sensible, friendly folks who are in agreement that I do not live in Fairbanks. In fact, the woman who changed my listing wondered why there wasn’t a separate heading for Ester, as there is for North Pole. Beaver, Birch Creek, Chena Hot Springs, and many other little communities also have separate sections, but of course, even if their population might be far smaller than that of Ester, they aren’t in the immediate vicinity of Fairbanks. It would be nice if the vicinity of Fairbanks wasn’t equated with the city itself. Some locals have suggested that Ester could print up its own phone directory, perhaps through the Ester Community Association. I wouldn’t mind owning one. It would be a good supplement to the big, area-wide phone book that we have now, at least here in the village. Given the number of artists in Ester, we could probably get a very classy cover for it. A local yellow pages would be interesting and useful, and I bet the local businesses would benefit a bit more from the tourist trade if visitors could simply pick up a phone book to see what was around. Word of mouth is a good means for locals to get their message across, and a person can always run down to the post office and take a gander at the bulletin board, but these methods aren’t as dependable as having a local phone book. A phone directory on a local scale could help connect people with resources in their own neighborhood that they otherwise might not have heard about, simply because they didn’t see the business card at the P.O. or they weren’t in on the conversation where the subject came up. Still, anyone looking at the Fairbanks directory might believe that we lived there rather than here. The woman at PTI was cheerful and helpful and sympathised with me, but she was not in a position to do much about the policy of the phone company or the phone directory publisher with regard to listings. So I asked her if there was someone to whom I could address my concerns. She gave me the following name and address: Diane Loveid, P.T.I. Communications, P.O. Box 72215, Fairbanks, AK 99707. I plan to write a letter, and I encourage others who feel the same to do so too, but it may be that we could sidestep the whole problem of fighting Ma Bell over the phone book by simply doing our own. | ||
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