So-I’m driving and trying to get to an appointment, following my handy printed yahoo maps instructions but I can’t find the street to turn onto. I’m pretty sure I’ve gone too far and I don’t want to be late so I call.
Me: I’m on the road but I can’t seem to locate Your Street to turn onto. Do you have a nearby cross street so I can see if I’m close?
Them: You know we’re on Your Street, right?
Me: Yes, just trying to find Your Street.
Them: Well just enter it into your GPS and it will tell you how to get here.
At this point I had to consider the various options
#1) Of course, how stupid of me not to realize that I had to enter the address into a GPS for it to work!
#2) If I had a #$(%^% GPS do you think I would have called you?
#3) Is then anybody there who actually knows how to get there?
I don’t have a GPS; I would do the same as the OP, google the address and either write down the directions or print them out. If they were flawed (as they so often are) and I called the place, I’d expect better directions than, “Use your GPS.”
Before I got my GPS (hand-me-down from my husband, who got a newer model), I would also Google the address and write down or print out the directions. I’d also check my big book o maps to get an idea of where I was going. We have a company which produces indexed street maps around here, called Mapsco, and the book for each city is about the size of the phone book.
But as for worst directions ever, those would be any directions that I ever gave, unless I was actually looking at a map at the time. I have a variety of useful skills. Unfortunately, I can’t claim navigation as one of those skills. And yes, when I play FRPGs, I always want to play a ranger, but mostly I resist the temptation.
I don’t hold with this here new-fangled technology. I’m lucky to have a cell phone and I still have my pager although I still say that if someone needs to contact the doctor they should go with the old-fashioned system and “send the boy”.
I was actually give similar directions when I was going to pick up a kitten.
“Turn left at the Jackson store.”
(The Jackson store had been closed for about 40 years and was just a dilapidated old building. I drove past it a few times before I noticed a faded sign painted on the side declaring it to be Jackson’s Imporium.)
“Go a mile or so” ( It was 5) “until you come to the old rusty truck, in the horse pasture.”
(The truck was so old it had mostly collapsed in on itself. It was unrecognizable as a truck. Oh, and no horses anywhere.)
“Turn at the next driveway, that’s us.” (The driveway appeared to be a drain for the hill. It was about a mile long, at about a 12% grade, with switch backs that I had to do 3 point turns on.)
I said, “Your directions wheren’t very good.” “Well, you got here, didn’t you, BTW, you said you’d be here by 6:00pm, it’s 7:30pm, maybe you aren’t reliable enough to have the kitten.”
(She really didn’t care, I got the kitten. Then, I asked her to move her car enough for me to turn around.) She said, “Oh, we back down all the time.”
What sucks is when every GPS actually has an incorrect route at a particular spot.
My husband and I drove to southern Indiana to adopt our rescue dog. We had a GPS, iPhone with google maps and a Verizon kinda-smartphone with turn by turn nav. Every one of them gave the wrong directions to get from Road A to Hwy B. They all said to turn right onto Tiny Road C (that had a handful of houses and farms) for 2 miles, then you’d run into Hwy B.
You actually needed to keep going on Road A another few miles and then do something totally different to get to Hwy B. But somehow this incorrect map section wound up on EVERY GPS’ map software. The residents of Tiny Road C actually made a sandwich board out of plywood sheets and hand-painted something like HEY! IF YOU ARE TRYING TO GET TO HWY B DON’T FOLLOW YOUR FUCKING GPS! IT WON’T WORK! DO THIS INSTEAD: (actual accurate directions)
I don’t have a mobile phone. :eek:
(I’m retired, so my landline does me just fine.)
Recently I had a problem with my landline, so I used the Internet to contact my service provider.
We were typing away using screen messaging, when the operator suddenly said “This is too slow - call me on your mobile” - and hung up. :smack:
I live in an English country town.
Sometimes drivers ask me for directions. I’m pretty good at it, but have to resist the temptation to utter the phrase “You want to go there? Oh, then I wouldn’t start from here!”
Our family rented a farmhouse while vacationing/visiting relatives in central PA. My sister was reading the directions they gave and came to the line “go down Main Street and turn left at Dr Bobeck’s office.” I say “do they realize we have no idea where Dr Bobeck’s office is?” We never see the sign and make our way to the house anyway. Later, they’re giving us directions to someplace else and include “it’s 2 streets past Dr. Bobeck’s office.” We laugh because apparently this Dr. is the center of the universe here. Again, we never see the office. All their directions involved Dr. Bobeck
Anyhoo, we’re packing up to leave, when a jogger approaches us and asks if he can use our phone. Apparently he just received a page from the hospital, and he introduces himself as…bum bum bum…Dr Bobeck.
These are not the worst directions ever. To give the worst directions ever, you must follow Mad Magazine’s three golden rules:
Refer to all four points of the compass as “over yonder”.
Describe any distance between 0.1 miles and 100 miles as “down the road a piece”.
Include at least one shocker guaranteed to distract the listener from everything else, like “the house with the dead cow in the driveway” or “the place with the naked girl chained up in the backyard”.
You want worst directions? I’ll give you worst directions: My mom once drew me a map that was nothing but a line with various right angles. I thought it was one road with some sharp bends. Nope, she just drew in where she wanted me to turn, but didn’t put intersections on it or street names. Just a line with bends. Yeah, that worked a charm.
GPS or Google Maps or other on line sites are just plain wrong in many instances. And not just out in the boondocks. I got misdirected in downtown Portland, Or to a dead end that was no where near the right place.
I do kind of live out in the boonies and on most on line maps my road is shown wrong. It was a short road of about 1/2 mile with houses on it. Later the highway was improved and an overpass was built which shares commonality for both my road and a major logging road mainline that goes up into the mountains.
On most on line maps the entire mainline is shown as ‘Dallas Jones Road’. It is amusing to rate the IQ of a new Fed Ex driver when you see them drive right past the house and up into the wilds of the forest. They usually turn around and discover the parallel road with the houses on it within 10 minutes. Those are the smart ones, the dumb ones don’t come back until the next day.
I once got some directions from a guy in rural Arkansas and asked him how far I had to go. “It’s a piece up the road,” he said. I asked how far that was and he added “a fur (far) piece.” I later deduced that a ‘fur piece’ was about 3 miles.
We used Microsoft Streets & Trips to guide us on one of our trips to the Midwest. It was a current version at the time and had us looking all over for this bridge until we finally found someone to ask. He told us that the access ramps had been removed about five years prior!
I got seriously annoyed at the construction project manager the first time I went to a jobsite.
She gave me the address as 40 Smithtown, Old Town NY ( I’m changing the address for client privacy ). I plug the address into my GPS and go to 40 Smithtown Rd, Old Town NY. The GPS did not show any other options. I end up in the driveway of an unoccupied home at 40 Smithtown Rd.
After about 30 minutes of trying I get through to the bonehead PM ( who’s the boss’s daughter ). It turns out the correct address is 40 Smithtown-Phillips Avenue but "it’s a new road, it won’t show up on your GPS.
Now, I had a set of blueprint that showed the address as 40 Smithtown and about 2 dozen e-mails referring to the address as 40 Smithtown. In one of the e-mails regarding the meeting I asked for the exact address of the meeting ( a standard request because people always neglect to give me suite numbers and other information ). The response was 40 Smithtown, Old Town NY.
I’m just glad those people weren’t home that day or I would’ve been really embarrassed.
According to multiple GPS modules, you reach my workplace by driving down Interstate 88 and turning left at the office. You know, because we have a driveway off the interstate or something.
In reality, the closest exit ramp off I-88 is a couple miles away and you’ll need to make a few turns to get here.
I own a number of GPS devices, including a few Garmins (e-Trex, ForeRunner, & a Nuvi). I have also used a bunch more.
ALL of them that I used gave you a location in 3D, meaning latitude, longitude, & altitude…or so I thought! :eek: I learned the hard way that since they’re designed for cars Nuvi’s don’t! They only show position as if you were on Terra-firma! For most people that’s fine but we were 800’ up in a hot-air balloon with my bike. As we fly over the intersection (below), ‘Nellie’ tells me to “Turn Right”.
::Looks around basket::
No, I don’t think so! :smack: This is what it looked like last night!
I just realized, I can see my car.
