I hate the phone.  I don’t like to talk to people on the phone.  I won’t answer the phone when it rings unless I know exactly who it is and really really have to talk to them.  And I put off calling people on the phone like I put off going to the dentist.  I am, however, a very curious person and the fact that my phone is ringing really really makes me wonder who’s at the other end.  Of course caller ID covers this most of the time.  In fact, many cable boxes, satellite dish receivers, DVRs, etc these days will even display caller ID information on the screen while you’re watching TV so  you can choose if the caller or the repeat of Everybody Loves Raymond is more important.  But some people feel the need to block caller ID information, and cell phones often don’t report the information like normal land lines do.  So when I happen to be at my computer and the phone rings and all I see is the phone number, I turn to the White Pages Reverse Lookup page.

The concept is simple and the results are almost instantaneous. You type the number of the person that’s calling you into text field at the website: Reverse Lookup.  Once you hit return the page updates and displays the person’s information, including name, address, apartment number, and AGE estimate.  Ok, nothing that mind blowing there, but there is a cooler feature that shows up when the caller is calling from a cell phone (which is more and more these days).  The results for cell phone callers also return a map of where the call is coming from.  For instance, my phone just rang while I was typing this and the caller was calling me from Middleburg, VA (25 minutes away from my home).  The map feature includes a satellite view of the caller’s location, so I can switch to that mode and zoom all the way in and see what store they must have been shopping at as well as all of the statistics for the town they are in, including: the number of people that live there, what the average median household income is, and the median age of the residents.

It can’t be that much longer before the amount of information returned via these sorts of lookups becomes something like out of science fiction movies and TV shows about the FBI.  How much longer until the results of my 10 digit phone number lookup include information like a driver’s license photo, current employer, and other detailed tidbits of the person’s life?

So you see, I don’t have to answer the phone to satisfy my curiosity, there’s more than enough interesting information available.  Here we have yet another example of the power of the free information that is available to us these days.