David Strom does a good job of describing the awful Tower of Babel mess we are in with the myriad of ways to supposedly "contact" someone. It's a good read, and describes what most of us struggle with on a daily basis.
To Strom's complaints, I'd add one more: the utter worthlessness of the old-fashioned phone book. We get two or three different versions of a telephone directory book at home and at the office. Each one comes from a different local phone providers, and each one has a different set of listings for the white pages. To find someone's number, you might, if you are lucky, have to look in three different directories. If the person for whom you are trying to locate a number has gone to a VoIP provider, they won't be in any of them. Or if they only have a cell phone, they won't be in any of them.
Read Strom's whole article, and then weep.