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For many decades, most homes had a fairly simple piece of tech that is now absent.

If you look at the average household you won't find a trace of this device, a critical piece of communications technology that was once the cornerstone of staying in touch with friends and family.

I'm talking, of course, about the good old landline phone.

However, it's not just the hardwired phone we've lost -- there's something even more important that has gone the way of the dodo.

I'm talking about the good old-fashioned phone book.

Yes, once upon a time it was pretty easy to get ahold of someone if you knew their name -- you'd just look them up in the phone book and give them a call.

I find it confounding that today it can be a whole lot harder to get ahold of someone, despite all the advances in communications technology.

Now that we all carry cellphones and most have relinquished their land-lines, how do you find out someone's phone number?

There is just no equivalent of yesterday's phone book. If you don't know someone's mobile number then you're just out of luck.

Sure, if they have a social media profile then you can likely use that mechanism to get ahold of them but there are huge swathes of the population who don't use Facebook or Instagram -- how do you find and contact those people?

It's so ironic that all these tech advances have actually made it harder to reach out to the average person and establish communications with them.

What is also ironic is that in an era when we're increasingly giving up privacy in return for convenience, we'd probably have a heart attack if someone said that they were going to publish everyone's address in a book and then deliver that book to every household in the district -- yet that's exactly what used to happen with the old phone books.

That's right, we now carry smartphones with the power of yesterday's supercomputers and connectivity that lets you wirelessly stream movies in full HD -- but there's no way to look up a friends mobile number if you've lost it.

It's a crazy world.

Carpe Diem folks!

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