In an oddly related way this reminds me of a time prior to the Internet. In that era you would open up the Yellow Pages and call a company or a store and ask them if they "carried such and such widget". They would reply "no". You would then say "do you know of anyone who does" hoping for a tidbit of info or direction on who you could contact next. The person on the other end would inevitably tell you to, as if this was valuable info, "why don't you try the Yellow Pages?". People really did that. The irony is not that you got their number from the YP but that they thought they were giving you good advice by telling you to use something that was as ubiquitous as doing a google search is today.
