If you're going to ask for directions, give complete information

I suppose that’s what he could have meant, but that’s not what I was getting from him. I’ve never heard anyone talk about xx00 blocks except for cab drivers.

It is funny when people start arguing about directions. Earlier today I was out back at work when someone asked for directions to a specific address. It’s a cul-de-sac, let’s call it Willow Street. On one side is a medical school, on the other the back of a hospital. In the middle is a medical library. The library and school are 10 Willow and 25 Willow, but I can never remember which is which.

The guy was looking for 10 Willow. I told him it was one of the two buildings but he wasn’t buying it. He insisted that the hospital must be 9 Willow. INSISTED. When I told him that it’s actually 15 Elm Street, he acted stunned. I could almost see him phase out to a different dimension for a second. How could he be on two different streets at once? How could he be both on Willow and not on Willow? He was the Schroedinger’s Cat of lost people.

He had a hard time wrapping his head around the idea that the hospital gets its address from the street that the main entrance is on, one street over.

I once gave a guy directions–he got halfway to where he was going, decided that I gave him bad directions, turned around, came back, and yelled at me. If he would have followed through with all the directions, he would have got there just fine.

Also, I used to live relatively close to the California border. I worked at a gas station (in Oregon there is no self-serve gas) idiots would argue with me, then ask where the nearest self-serve station was. I’d give them directions to the closest California town–about 45 minutes away (without really mentioning how far it was.)

Okay, I gotta fess up and admit my dummy self looking for directions story.

My college bud and I were way out in the boonies looking for a place. Stop at a SMALL country store. Guy is quite helpful. Directions are easy. Go about X miles west down this county road, and take the dirt road to the left. Go about a half mile and you are there. Or take the second dirt road further down to the left.

Now keep in mind, in these parts, even dirt roads where often miles apart.

Wait now, do we take the first or second?

Doesn’t matter.

What do you mean it doesnt matter?

It doesnt matter.

This gets repeated a few times and we sorta get the drift and decide to go with it anyway despite some reservations. Turns out the second dirt road is literally only about a hundred feet further down the highway from the first and they both merge together headed south within about a hundred feet as well.

It wasnt quite as durrr on our part as it sounds because this guy talked in some pretty strange country speak that I’ve translated a bit. But if the dude had only said something like “they go to the SAME place” or sumptin it would have helped a bit.

I was out working in front of my garage when a car pulled up across the street and 3 ladies got out. They approached and started making small talk about the weather and how they fought traffic getting here and they were still early and suprised they were the first ones there. I assumed they were there to visit my next door neighbors (retired couple who have a lot of visitors) and were just being friendly. They seemed awful chatty though and weren’t heading next door.
I finally excused myself and said “well, back to work” and one replied “oh, so should we just go inside then?”
“Excuse me?”
“For the open house?”
“Mmmm, no open house here today. Do you have the right address?”
“Yes, 2111 Goodyear Court, just like on your house.”
“I see. However this is 2111 Goodyear Ave. You want the street over.”

They were pretty embarassed.

Got lost once because of that. In my defense, at no point were the streets labeled ‘Blah Ave S’, it was all just ‘Blah Ave’. We were trying to find the hotel and kept on running into a residential district of old wartime houses.

Hey, at least where you live there ARE street addresses. Japan by and large still uses a grid system, which would be fine if everything was in, yanno, grids. Most areas are all googly-nuts-shaped and going anywhere requires an extensive description, lots of landmarks, and a quick prayer to the patron saint of ‘I am lost as fuck.’

Oh, and asking for directions and being obtuse is better than not asking for directions when you should. As in, I once had a taxi driver spend 5 minutes randomly driving a suburb of town before shyly blurting out “I don’t actually know where that place is…” Jiminy-Cricket-on-Toast, I could have easily pointed the right roads… Thank God I had google maps on my phone or I’d probably be still driving around with that dude.

What gets me is when people as for directions to a place that I know of that’s quite a distance away, unless they have a map in their hands I automatically think to myself “they’re never going to remember all this” and just say sorry don’t know the place.

I never travell unless I know exactly where I’m going and how to get there. I just don’t get in my car and shoot up down the road.

Reminds me of another one - someone pulled over and asked my husband directions on how to get to Atlanta.

As in, they were in the suburbs of Chicago, and asked him this. :smack:

They were coming from Milwaukee, and his impression was that there was some kind of family emergency that they were driving down there for without a real good idea of actually how far away it was, and without a map. Apparently they had the notion that if they drove southeastish, pretty soon they’d see “Georgia” show up on the green Interstate signs to guide their way, and it sounds like someone was either concerned that there weren’t any cues by the time they reached Chicago, or someone argued that they were being foolish and needed another opinion, and they should pull off the highway and find someone to ask.

He gave them a quick outline of what interstates would be easier to take to get there (after a consult on his iPhone of Google Maps or something), directions to get back on the Interstate, and explicit instructions to stop at the first ‘oasis’ and get a big national map.

That’s true enough, except for major arteries where you get majorly confusing signs. I suppose the people could have been new to Calgary and not aware that first you find quadrant, then you find address.

I thought of another direction-asking issue I had once which couldn’t be explained by that - we ordered pizza to be delivered to our house, and I had to argue with the delivery guy that yes, our house was indeed in the NE half of our large, Centre Street-straddling neighbourhood - no, I know that there is Fake Neighbourhood in the northwest, too, but we’re not there - you can go there if you want, but you won’t find us, and our pizza will start getting cold. I thought a local delivery guy who delivers in this neighbourhood all the time would have learned that as one of the first things.

I don’t know if anyone else on this board will appreciate this as much as you will, unless they’re familiar with the area.

Before I lived in the building I’m living in, I took a cab there to see a friend. I was coming from Jamaica Plain. That’s maybe 3 miles and $15. I specified that it was Comm Ave and the address. The guy took me all the way to Back Bay, where the brownstones are, then slowly drove west, looking at every single address on the way.

It was frustrating, so I told the guy to take me to Cleveland Circle. I figured that even the dumbest cabbie would know where that was. We finally ended up near that sushi place. Not Fin’s, the other one. He insisted that that was Cleveland Circle. I didn’t know the area very well at the time, but I was 100% that it wasn’t CC. He kept insisting that it was, and if he argued the point enough times, I’d eventually believe him.

The fare at that point was up to about $40.

Please tell me you really talk like this. :slight_smile: I love the visual of shooting on up down the road.

Quite the opposite of asking for directions… about 30 years ago, I was hitch-hiking in Galway in the west of Ireland, aiming to come back to London. Car pulled up and asked where I was heading, I told him I was aiming for Dun Laoghaire for the ferry to Wales. He asked again where I was heading, so I told him London. Again, he asked where I was heading, so I said “Plumstead”… to be asked what street.

Turned out he lived two streets away from me.

Google Maps and that ilk have some problems. I once got directions - somewhere - which were fine at the destination. The first parts were not. It placed my house about 2 miles west of where it really was, to start with. Then to get on the highway I needed, it routed me UNDER the highway, to a road that paralleled the highway, via a non-existent road that would have gone into a canal. Three miles south on that, back west half a mile and get on the highway.

So I can understand how these mistakes can happen. I’m arguing with my TomTom over where I live, too. If I use the address, it misses by enough to occasion snide remarks of “Turn Around” from its AI, and if I set it by position, it thinks I live on the street that ends across the road and gives the wrong turn to start out. (I know better than to listen, of course, but it’s annoying.)

We live in a shore town, off of a road that takes you directly to the ocean about six miles away – this scenario that plays out at least once a week in the summer:

Benny: Hey, which way to the beach?
Me: (pointing east) That way. If your ankles get wet, you’ve gone too far.

The taxi examples might not actually be the driver not knowing the address, but just deliberately running up the fare. Taxis might be the only business model where they get paid more the worse their service is.

In this case I truly believe that the cabbie was a fur brain.

Most of them are actually pretty good in my experience.

I’ve had cabbies turn back the fare meter when they realize they’ve taken a wrong turn. I appreciated that, even though I would have had no idea he had taken the wrong way, since I had never gone to the destination before.

The first time I used my shiny new navigator was when we went to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, about thirty miles down US60 from where I live. We’d been there many times and the entrance is right on the highway so I really didn’t need the nav, I was just getting used to working it. So, I’m going down the road watching the display scroll and the miles count down, and we’re at the entrance when the nav says there’s seven miles to go, about three miles west of Superior.

When we left, I continued on (we were going to Globe, anyway) and when the nice lady proudly we’d arrived at “Bos Th’ms’n Arb’rtum” (That was when I figured the speech synthesized) we were three miles east of Superior at a nothing in particular spot. The place has a real address (37615 U.S. Hwy 60) so when I got home, I plugged it into Mapquest, and was about a thousand feet off, Google Earth, which was about a half mile off, and finally Google Maps, which had the seven mile off location. I figure Magellan is using Google Maps’ database.

It kind of shook my confidence but it’s never been so far off since. Once it was a good quarter mile off, but since it was for a big-ass hotel I had no trouble finding it. Most of the time it’s within a hundred feet.

I’ve been in your building. I may still be lost in it, hallucinating my life. :wink:

Chicagoites sometimes use 100 blocks, but we never leave off the 100. Belmont Ave is “thirty two hunerd”, maybe, but never “thirty-two”.

What I hate is giving directions to taxi drivers. It tends to go like this.

Me: Ok, you have to turn right at the –
Driver: veers right, usually into a parking lot

Okay, now we’re back out on the street, let’s try that again.

Me: You need to drive about half a mile. When you get to the light at State street, go right.
Driver: turns right at the next light

Okay, next try.

Me: is silent, waits until two seconds before the guy needs to make said turn
Me: Turn right at the—
Driver: veers into corner gas station
Me: – at the corner.