After a bit of a decluttering binge, I’ve been selling miscellaneous stuff on Marketplace. I have no issue with people coming to my house to pick up, and once I’m sure they’re serious, I’ll give them my address. I used to add “Off 5 between Mechanicsville and Leonardtown” so they’d have a general idea of where I am. But I don’t even bother with that any longer. Everyone seems to have GPS.
Even when having food delivered, I used to say “House on the corner” but since there are big numbers on our mailbox at the end of the driveway, that’s not necessary. It seems every nav program I’ve seen will bring you right up our driveway. So I no longer have to say “Southbound, about 3 miles past the WaWa, turn left.” And I don’t have to deal with people telling me “Turn right where the big tree used to be…”
Can someone find your house without your assistance?
They could, but they don’t. Especially deliveries. No reason why. It’s painfully easy and both street and house number are clearly marked and appear on mapping apps.
GPS seems to think our house is on the side street that we are on the corner of.
We live at 123 Small Street at the intersection of Tiny Lane. GPS will tell you to turn into Tiny Lane and our house will be 100 feet down. But our driveway is either 100 feet before or after Tiny Lane on Small Street (depending on which way you are coming from).
So if someone is coming to our house we tell them to ignore the last bit of the GPS directions and stop at the house with a large yew at the end of the driveway. You can’t see the house from the street very well, so telling them the color of the house would not do them much good.
We have two streets with the same name in our neighborhood. Perhaps technically they’re the same street but they’re not connected. Causes some confusion. We have a private driveway with three houses and ours is the last one. People get confused. We recently put up some numbers at the last turn to make it easier.
Generally, I have to give someone a little information even with GPS. “Follow GPS to this point, and then do this and that to get to our actual house”
Google maps thinks my address is on the perpetually locked rear of the condo building I live in. I constantly have to give specific instructions for the final approach.
I also gave instructions the other day to someone on where to find a Lazuli Bunting in a park, but I guess that is a different question .
Not all GPS apps are alike. Bing Maps and companies which rely on their maps for GPS have us in a cul-de-sac one block over; I had to add instructions for delivery drivers to not follow GPS down the street which leads to the cul-de-sac.
I recently looked into ordering Domino’s via their website, saw that they no longer have us in the correct location but rather in that cul-de-sac and didn’t bother.
Google used to have us on the wrong side of the street. Getting them to change the street’s center line for our block was an easy fix but then they put us way out in the woods behind the complex.
Haven’t had any issues with Google Maps since asking them to move our building’s pin marker to the correct location. Still waiting for Microsoft to correct their marker.
I live on a street of nearly identical houses. Whenever someone new is coming over, I tell them it’s the house across the street from the streetlight pole. So, it’s been within the last 2 or 3 months.
As I said, the houses are cookie-cutter. Years ago, we were sitting down to family dinner when a complete stranger walked right into the house and up to our dinner table. He was looking for the house next door.
My house has been easy since we got a big sign with the street number out front. But one of my friends lives in a place where gps gives bad directions for the last 100 yards. We follow the directions he gave us. Others who don’t end up at various nearby places that aren’t convenient to his front door. (Different GPS devices give different bad directions.)
More accurately, my building’s address is legitimately where Google thinks it is. But the developer put the lobby entrance on the opposite face of the building on what amounts to a private street that goes around the other off-street faces of the squarish building.
They also built a decoy lobby you encounter before the real one if you go around the building in the most common direction.
Not smart design.
Problem is trying to describe that to BrandX package delivery services. There’s not really a way to put that info into their systems. Nor can the mostly non-English speaking drivers read them if I did.
Sigh.
But wait; there’s more!
I live at 123 East Big Boulevard. There’s an unrelated residential building at 123 West Big Boulevard about 3/8mi away. Also with a hard to find lobby set weirdly in the building.
Both building managements are constantly dealing with packages where the driver misses the E vs. W or East vs. West and leaves them at the wrong building.
My street turns 90 deg to the right and changes names, and my house appears to be on the new street so I get misplaced food deliveries a lot, so if I see the driver I explain. I also have an apartment complex on the other side of a wall in our back alley so delivery folks looking for those addresses get lost and it is a bit of a ride to get out of where we are to the next neighborhood where they can get access.
One of the biggest hassles I have is when service or delivery people come and I need them to enter the back yard. We’re on a corner and our address is “A” Street. The cross street is “R” Avenue and we have a double gate for entering the yard off that road. I will go to pains to tell the company dispatch or whoever else that the deliveries/work trucks need to come half a block down R from A and turn left into the open gates. So, naturally, they come down our driveway to our garage, and I have to tell them to back down the drive and come around the side (at which point, I skitter to the side gate so they can see me beside the huge opening in the fence and the 2 gates swung out towards the road.)
We’ll see how the septic guys do next time we have them come over. Every time, I tell them and every time they have to back down the driveway…
My folks were in town to visit, and despite years of efforts on Programming the GPS in their phones, they just don’t use it. So I emailed them a map and gave additional verbal instructions, and when the later got lost in town, my wife (who is more-or-less an actual local here) gave them further audio directions.
Our house is on a split level street, AND the house number two off from ours is about 2km away down one of those split roads, so if you find what is apparently the house next door to ours - it isn’t. So yes, I constantly have to go to the nearest corner and wave people into the right part of the street.
There is a couple of our acquaintance who are incapable of finding their way anywhere; whether they try GPS and fail or just don’t use it we don’t know, but their navigation technique is to ring us up and ask how to get to, eg, the restaurant we are meeting at. And, unsurprisingly, they are always late.
It seems to be a whole-of-family problem, since once we met them at a restaurant on the 6th floor of a shopping centre; their children managed to get to the ground floor but rang their parents to ask how to get from there to the 6th.
Answering the question posted by the thread title: March 28, most recent No Kings Day. Car pulled close to where I was on the sidewalk, window rolled down, asked me if I knew how to get to the Hempstead Turnpike. I pointed and said where to turn.
Not everyone has a finite address in mind that their GPS will recognize. Or they do but their GPS misdirects them anyhow. I can’t tell you how many times our GPS has proudly announced “You have reached your destination” when the car was surrounded by pine trees and empty shoreline, or equivalent. Not to mention the time we were trapped behind a “wide load” red-flagged behemoth rolling 12 mph and input “find a different route” and specified “get me off this state route” and four minutes later found myself aimed at someone’s backyard at a T intersection and the GPS telling me to continue straight ahead.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re great and they work most of the time, but they’re not foolproof by any means.
My place is kind of tucked away and easy to miss, so I’m not surprised if someone struggled to find it first time. My deliveries do arrive okay, but they likely use GPS and are locals.
The last time I helped give directions in other contexts was just a couple of months ago when some guy who was still using a paper street directory was about 5km away from where he wanted to be. He was at the southern end of a very long road, but needed to be at the northern end.
About 3 weeks ago I was walking in the city on a Sunday morning and an American tourist came up to me and asked if I knew where bills was. I asked why she had chosen to ask me and she said, “You just look approachable.” Her husband was parking the car while she found the restaurant. I replied, "It is there, " pointing to the hotel just down the street which has a parking garage where I had just parked.
Many years ago, before ubiquitous GPS, my drummer nephew asked me to pick up a jazz kit that he had bought from a woman. I was going down to visit my brother later in the week so it worked perfectly. Except that she lived in an inner city suburb that I, like most people, got lost in whenever I went there. I explained this to her while we were arranging a pick up time and she asked, “Where are you coming from?” I told her and almost instantly received an SMS with clear, detailed directions to her place. I expressed surprise at how quickly it had come and she said she had saved directions on her phone that covered arrivals from anywhere. I said, “'That is remarkably organized.” She said, “I hope it would be. My money paying job is as a project manager.”
Many people ring the bell on the office front door, wanting to pay their parking tickets or get their cars back from the pound (which covers three London boroughs and used to be a Ford dealer workshop). We had to fix a notice on the door pointing them to the right building on the other side of the take out place between us. If we get a spate of bellringers we know the notice has fallen off or been torn off again. Presumably their phones tell them they are at the right location.
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