Re: Introducing the city

usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Catja Pafort) wrote on 18.12.05 in <1h7rf7l.a881nea1p2f4N%usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> Ric Locke <warlocke@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> [Dan]
>
> > > And then there are the people who give directions according to *former*
> > > landmarks: "You head straight on until you get to the corner where they
> > > tore down the brewery four years ago, and then you turn left and go
> > > along to just past where the Olsens lived until they lost everything on
> > > Black Friday and had to sell out, and you take the dirt road on your
> > > right to where the old duck pond dried up, and it's right on the other
> > > side of the field that the Preservation Bureau used to rent for the
> > > buffalo..."
> > >
> > > And of course, they *always* end with "You can't miss it."
> >
> > Some comedian somewhere altered that to "...you can't help but miss it."
> >
> > This became a watchphrase in my family for a long, long time. All of us
> > have/had a good sense of direction and a memory for landmarks. We've all
> > gotten very frustrated at times from receiving bad directions. I'm
> > personally quite un-fond of New Englanders in that respect. Yes, I know
> > the roadnet was set up in the old days and more or less at random, but
> > Great Ghu you'd think they'd know which way North is!
>
> Some USians seem to use roads as a marker to orient themselves. Which is
> fine a lot of the time, but fails when you get to those roads that are
> simultaneously somethingNorth and somethingElseEast.
>
> Bad directions can be.. interesting. And usually make me wince because
> the speaker could have used a perfectly good set of landmarks to
> describe the route.

I'm always astonished when I talk to a taxi driver about a route (ok, it
*also* astounds me how often that is necessary; I still remember when my
sister did that for a while, she had to learn where pretty much every
street was by heart - there was a test), and the driver seems to have
either no idea which way is north, or else a totally bogus one. I can see
being off by about half a right angle, the city's not lined up, after all,
but not by a full right angle or more - have these people never even
*looked* at a map of the city? In their job?!

Of course, what do I expect of people who fail to understand "two times
right" ... (that particular one needed pretty much everything told at
least three times, and got half of them wrong anyway!)

Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx)
.

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