Peerless Television Service and Repair

The Source of the Error

    I asked myself a question that I often find myself asking myself: What should I do next? In this case, it was a question specific to Peerless Television Service and Repair. Should I approach Domenic and ask for his help? That seemed premature to me. If not that, then what?
    It has long been my habit, when faced with a problem or question or decision that requires some thought, to turn away from the vexing matter and take up some mindless task. I turned to polishing the chrome on one of our “petit confort” chairs. During the period of reflection that this work provided me, I decided that my next step should be trying to determine the source of the callers’ error. If I knew why people persisted in thinking that my number was Peerless’s number, then I would have something to offer Domenic when I went to see him. I wouldn’t arrive at Peerless with a problem; I would arrive with a proposal for a solution to a problem.
    Experimentally, I put myself in the place of someone whose television set needed service or repair. If I were in that position, I thought, I would look for a repair shop in the Yellow Pages. Our copy of the Yellow Pages was in the bottom of the office closet, on the lowest shelf of the bookcase that we had wedged in there to hold office supplies. I looked under the heading “Television: Service and Repair.” I looked under “Video Equipment: Service and Repair.” I looked under “Home Theaters: Service and Repair” and “Electronic Devices and Gadgets: Service and Repair.” Peerless wasn’t listed. Perhaps there was some other category under which Peerless was listed, but the most obvious categories wouldn’t have led anyone to Peerless, or to me.
    Next I turned to my favorite Internet search site, Boggle, where, their slogan says, “the results will boggle your mind.” In this case the slogan was true, because finding the correct telephone number for Peerless was ridiculously easy. I tried several search strings and they all brought me an accurate listing for Peerless in several online versions of the Yellow Pages. Mind-boggling.
    I also found a news article about a man who had been apprehended in the act of fleeing Peerless with a satellite dish under his arm. Judging from the account in the archives of the Babbington Reporter, the theft had not been premeditated and the apprehension of the thief had been a lucky break.
    The thief, or, I suppose, the not-yet-but-soon-to-be thief, was strolling past Peerless when he noticed that Domenic was engaged in a heated conversation with a customer and that a stack of cartons containing spanking-new satellite dishes stood just inside the open doorway. Like a quick-thinking fox that seizes an opportunity when one presents itself, grabbing a stray lamb when he stumbles upon one and hustling it home for the vixen and pups, the passer-by reached in, grabbed a carton, and went on his way. However, Domenic was not as attentive to the customer as the thief assumed him to be. In the corner of his eye he observed the theft. At once he shouted “Stop, thief!” The customer, an off-duty cop who had come to the store to remonstrate with Domenic about the length of time that repairs to his television set were taking, promptly pursued the thief, and, since the cop wasn’t burdened by an unwieldy carton containing a satellite dish, he soon collared him.
    “Interesting,” I said to myself.
    Next I Boggled our own telephone number. Albertine and I came up as the people most likely to be reached by dialing it, and Peerless was nowhere to be found.
    Apparently, people weren’t being misled online. Maybe Information was misinforming them.
    I hadn’t used Information, or Directory Assistance, for years. I wasn’t even sure that it still existed. I checked the telephone directory. After some time, I managed to find a number for it. I dialed it.
    After a moment, a woman’s voice, recorded, digitized, and reconstituted by a computer program, a voice as thin and sweet as a “juice drink,” asked me what I wanted.
    “I’d like the number for Peerless Television Service and Repair in Babbington, New York,” I said.
    In what seemed like no time at all, another voice gave me the same number that I had found online, Peerless’s number, not mine.
    “I don’t understand it,” I said to Albertine.
    “Supersymmetry breaking?” she asked. “D-branes? Calabi-Yau manifolds? The Nambu-Goto action?”
    “No,” I said with a chuckle. “I don’t understand where people are getting our number as the number for Peerless. It’s not listed in the Yellow Pages, it’s not on the Web—”
    “They’re using the Handi-Dandi Guide.”
    “The what?”
    She opened the cabinet where we keep our food delivery menus. From it she produced a miniature version of the Yellow Pages.
    With a directness and clarity seldom found in treatments of string theory, she said, “The Handi-Dandi Guide is somebody’s attempt to make a few dollars by listing local businesses in a more compact book than the Yellow Pages. I suppose there’s one for every city, town, and village in America, but I don’t actually know that.”
    With trembling hands I opened the Handi-Dandi Guide. Peerless had a small ad under “Television: Service and Repair.” The ad gave our telephone number.