Takes Direction Poorly
Are people properly concerned over the recent growth in GPS navigation systems?
This one has danger written all over it. And yet there is no sense of alarm, no symposiums staffed with wild-eyed social scientists seizing the microphone and saying 'if not here, where?", no think pieces in the Sunday papers titled "Whither America?".
We're all fine with the technology, certain that these are good men and women who are unaware of the damage they’re wreaking. Nonetheless, many of us can’t help but feel that we will be losing something special, something uniquely American, if we all know where we’re going all the time.
Etched in history are the images of grown men who have entered factories, industrial bakeries, rest homes, funeral parlors, and judge’s chambers to nonchalantly ask the people there if they happen to know the quickest way to the Sauerkraut Festival.
It takes a certain caliber of man to enter, say, a corporate headquarters dressed in plaid shorts, Hawaiian shirt, wingtips, and black socks pulled to just below the knees, in order to put the question directly to whomever might be in the lobby at the time, receptionist, janitor, Chairman of the Board, the cafeteria ladies.
And do you know what? They all jump right in and start sketching Route 58’s and County Line Road 2’s like mad, and marking crossroads with an X.
When else, now that the Golden Age of Piracy has passed, do you get to do that, this marking the map with an X business?
Social and caste lines are crossed with ease when the cafeteria lady corrects the Chairman of the Board and says, “not Business Bypass 62, this fellow needs to take exit 12, before the bypass cuts in,” and the Chairman, perhaps not used to having his judgment questioned, has to examine his conscience and says, “you know, you’re absolutely right, that will save him a good five minutes.”
These are the rare occasions though, these successes, and it speaks to the general sadness that attends existence.
In truth, by far the most common outcome of stopping to ask for directions is to drive away in much worse shape than you were before you stopped.
At least when you were driving in a completely random universe you could count on brute statistical chance, however infinitesimal, to pull you into the Festival just in time for the Cabbage Roll Smackdown over on the rodeo grounds.
Once you have stopped to ask someone for directions however, even that small chance is gone.
It’s hard to say why this should be so.
After all, people reasonably in the vicinity ought to have some idea of where the Festival is.
But there’s something, just something, about the question that throws even the sharpest mind into a territory where all previous directional knowledge is either obliterated or is somehow transformed into its opposite.
The person can be either too detail-oriented or not detail-oriented enough.
In the latter category would be the friendly native who simply throws his hand enthusiastically in one direction, like a sailor pointing towards the wide, wide ocean, and says “over there!”
Well, you kind of knew this already, aware that all facts pointed to the conclusion that you seemingly were in the right state or at least the right time zone.
"Over there' is a pretty broad statement. You were looking for something with a little more traction to it, something you could hang your hat on.
After all, everything in the universe is 'over there' from every other thing in the universe.
Like your English teacher in high school who has returned your one-paragraph essay on The Problem of the Individual in Society marked up in red ink, you are seeking more detail.
The opposite remains true though too, this would be the precise type who is nothing but detail, who, when asked about the mosquitoes around here, gives you an 8,000 word essay complete with Latin name, preferred diet, parenting methods, and voting patterns, when you were looking for something more along the lines of "I suppose we get a fair amount of skeeters."
Think of him with close cropped hair, all business, with a pencil tucked behind one ear, a person giving the impression of someone who teaches calculus at the junior college in his spare time.
His directions are so monumentally detailed that they end up being meaningless.
“Now, once you cross County Line Road, and I mean RIGHT when you cross, start counting the white lines on the roadway. You’ll go past a Big Burger, the movie rental house, three post office boxes, eight storm drainage structures, a dead elm, a dead maple, a dead walnut, fourteen patches of dead grass, and 106 driveways; when you have counted 2,342 white lines, make a right. THAT gets you onto….”
Well, my goodness, you tuned out back there at the movie rental place, and now are just nodding politely, jotting down random words in your notebook every time he looks at you so that he’ll think you’re paying attention.
There’s another type still who seems to strike the perfect balance.You know he’s doing his level best, understanding your situation, putting the directions into language that you’ll understand, pausing considerately to let it sink in, you really like this guy in other words, like him better than some of your friends back home, but for some reason or other it’s just not happening.
Every time he makes a point of describing the 4-way stop and the Exxon station on the southwest corner there, for some reason your mind just goes blank, and that 4-way stop may as well be on one of the moons of Uranus, if Uranus has moons, or scoured from the face of the earth for all the good it’s going to do you.
Well, it’s obvious to him – how could it not be? Your comprehension level right now is right down there with certain inanimate objects – and so he slows, and then halts entirely, halfway through a description of the high school practice field, right there at about the 45 yard line, the 45 yard line if you're on offense, that is.
That's when it hits him that he is up against a brick wall.
The two of you stand there, like men of the world who have come to a common realization, that you are just not going to get it and in that silent exchange of looks, here it comes again, the essential sadness of the universe descends upon the two of you. You might shake hands, or you both might simply turn away and walk in separate directions.
But either way it’s over, boy, it’s over.
And, my goodness, there are volumes to be written tallying the many words that people use with perfect abandon while directioneering, “you see, you see, you take High Street here till it does a kind of tailback? I mean it does a double gilled hookback like some folks call it? And halfway through the hookback there’s a kind of J curve melded to an S curve? OK, halfway through – I’m talking the double hookback now – you want to take the FIRST of the switchloops, because if you take the second you’ll go off the side of the mountain.”
And all the time you’re smiling, you’re grateful and all, but what you’re really saying to yourself is “what in the world, what in the absolutely WORLD is this man trying to tell me?” If you can keep from sobbing at that point, you’re a better man than me.
Maybe we were never meant to ask each other directions, perhaps part of the great scheme of natural selection is that any creature dumb enough to not know where they were going deserves to die out, along with the dodo bird and the other also-rans.
