I have absolutely no sense of direction. If two roads diverged in yellow wood, and one path led to where I wanted to get to, and the other was a circuitous path the ended up in a quarry with a 200 foot drop to chilly water with slightly-under-the-surface boulders, I would naturally gravitate toward the path of doom. Oh, I’d figure it out that I needed to backtrack a bit before the only choice was holding my nose and belly-flopping into the quarry, but my sense of direction is naturally awful.
After I got my driver’s license, I took a trial run to my high school. I had gone there every day for three years, but I still got lost.
I have friends and relations who have tremendous senses of direction. They can immediately figure out how to get from here to there. How I envy them. Sigh…
But I can read a map, and when paper maps were a thing that worked out just fine.
Then those maps became digitized, and they work out pretty well. Even when I’m walking to a place I’ve been before, I sometimes whip out my smartphone to make sure. The problem I have with those smartphone maps is two-fold: the orientation on the phone is sometimes goofy – especially for someone who is directionally challenged - and they often advise things like “head south by southwest”. And a lot of the time – on a cloudy day, after dark, at high noon – I’m never quite sure where exactly SSW is. I could use a compass, and I don’t believe there’s one on my phone.*
When I’m driving somewhere, I take a belt and suspenders approach. I print out directions (largest of large print, and then I highlight the key points) and a map, and also use my phone as needed.
But I’m not driving all that much, and mostly it’s to places I’ve driven before. Not that that makes for a 100% guarantee, but it helps.
I do know that when Google is telling us to turn left or right, those directions – while they may be technically correct – may not be workable. So we hear about people who ended up driving to the edge of a quarry…
And last week, drivers (almost 100 of them) trying to avoid an accident scene near Denver’s airport relied on Google Maps to provide them with a workaround. To their dismay and inconvenience. Connie Monsees was one of those who turned to Google in hopes of finding a detour. Seek and ye shall find. Which Connie did.
But that detour led her to a dirt road near the border of Denver and Aurora. She wasn’t immediately concerned thanks to crowd psychology.
“My thought was, ‘Well, all these other cars are in front of me, so it must be OK,” Monsees told ABC News’s Denver affiliate.
Then the dirt road turned into a muddy slop, as there had been rain in the area in the previous days.
“That’s when I thought, ‘Oh this was a bad decision,’” she told ABC, which reports that about 100 cars had taken the detour and ended up in the muddy empty field. A couple of cars in the front of the line got stuck in the mud. The road was tight and only allowed passage of one car at a time, so all the other cars got stuck behind the leaders of the pack.
“The question is, why did Google send us out there to begin with? There was no turning back once you were out there,” Monsees told ABC, which reports that the road is privately owned. ABC found a knocked over “road closed” sign next to the road, but couldn’t confirm with Denver or Aurora if the road was closed to public traffic.(Source: Gizmodo)
Google tries its damnedest, but, hey, sometimes private roads aren’t listed as private. Sometimes drivers don’t report stuff like they really ought to. Nobody’s perfect, even Google, and they advise drivers to “stay attentive, and use their best judgement while driving.”
And that best judgement should have been telling drivers not to turn into a muddy field. But when you’re used to following directions from Google. And when all your fellow drivers have already turned into that muddy field.
Monsee, you will be happy to learn, had all-wheel drive. “She even gave a few people rides to the airport—one of which was a passenger of an Uber that got stuck in the field.”
Ain’t technology grand?
Sometimes, I guess, you just need to suck it up and chill in sluggish, go nowhere traffic jam. Beats getting mired in mud.
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*There is now. Just installed Compass Galaxy, a free app that got pretty good reviews. I’m going to feel like the deer-slayer out there on the mean streets…
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