Pet peeve: getting directions
In the vein if my last post about older ways of thinking, there are three ways of giving directions.
First, to not give specific directions but only general ones. Assume that anyone finding your house or place of business is familiar enough with the area to know the building or major roads that you don’t have to be precise.
When we lived in New Hampshire this was common. I once got the directions, “Go south on highway 1, pass the first Dunkin’ Doughnuts, then turn left a half mile before the old Channel Hardware store.” For some reason most of the directions I got in New Hampshire and Massachusetts included Dunkin’ Doughnuts. Those stores were common enough to be landmarks. But my favorite part was to “turn a half mile before” that old store. That store went out of business before we moved to the area and the sign was long gone. Basically you had to already know where you were going to get there!
Second, to give specific directions including turns, streets you’ll see before your turns, and streets you’ll see if you miss your turns. In short, good directions. Good directions that are great if you don’t have a map or a GPS with a moving map. And are a waste of time with those devices.
I have Google Earth (version 5.1, the latest) installed on my computers. I have a GPS with a moving map in one car, and we have iPhones with GPS and moving maps with us in any case. Ten minutes of discussion on directions is wasting everyone’s time. And if it’s from your memory, it may not be right either.
What I want is a third way to give directions: Note the destination address, any issues not clear on maps (funny turn lanes, oddball corners, etc) and note parking information at the destination. I want the stuff that’s not clear on the GPS moving map. The whole turn-by-turn directions are not that useful.
October 29th, 2009 at 09:54
I don’t even bother with the “local knowledge” version of directions these days. You simply ask the person for their postal/zip code and that’s everyhting you need to program google maps, earth or any of the gps’ out there. With 6 short characters I can get right to your door and I don’t need to know where the old water tower used to be. It doesn’t work for NW pilots though, they seem to overshoot the destination by an hour or so.