Hey Gramps: I hear the next version of the Jitterbug will have an actual magnetic compass attached. 
My mother was born in Barcelona. The family moved several times; at one point, age 9, she found herself back in the city of her birth. During a family shinding she found out that her cousins who had always lived there had never visited the Cathedral, or in fact any of the Old Town (not even the streets known for helluva shops - nothing; your average “tourist who’s been in town for one day” has seen more of Old Town than they had). So, the following weekend, these 9 and 8 year old girls led their cousins aged 29 to 15 on a visit of the Cathedral and Old Town. It’s been a running joke among themselves ever since, when they run into each other, to ask “been to the Cathedral lately?”
How often do you think people working in a restaurant walk directly from work to the specific tourist attraction you’re looking for, especially if they work the evening shift? I don’t understand how they’re ‘dopes’ for not knowing the way to the specific place you want to go to when they probably don’t actually want to go there and you do.
I find your expectations insanely unreasonable - I expect wait staff to bring me food and drinks, and to know about their restaurant. I don’t expect them to somehow be a map and tour guide service, it’s not part of their job, and because it’s a low-paying job where they work late they’re often only going to commute to and from the area of the restaurant for work. The attitude that you can just decide that random junk is part of someone else’s job doesn’t make a lot of sense, and deciding not to pay attention to what direction you’re walking, not bring a map, and not have a map app is a lot dopier than anything they’ve done.
Reminds me of the time that I asked my teacher friend where the school was that he’d been transferred to.
Me: “Collegiate Montessori Salt Mine, where’s that?”
Him: “It’s, uh… gestures westward It’s, umm…
It’s in my GPS!”
Did you know where Madam Toussad’s was before you had visited it, though? Had you ever seen an open top bus loading stop?
Yeah, I’m in the same camp of “They commute there, and they don’t go to the tourist spots. How can you expect them to just know where everything you want to know about is, off the top of their head?”
Quick, you’re at work and you have 10 different things to pay attention to. There’s papers on the copier you have to collect, Mary wants another copy of the latest report, Bill is calling out that there’s been a coffee spill, some clients are walking in the door, another client is at your desk, the paper stack looks like it’s about the fall over, the phone is ringing and suddenly – “OH HEY, DO YOU KNOW THE WAY TO THE BEACH?” Yeah, OK. I’ll give you a sarcastic golf clap if you claim you can immediately point in the right direction. Or if you’re willing to drop the ball on all the other aspects of your job to think about it.
This is the same reason why I don’t agree with people who rant about those “dumb people” on TV who couldn’t answer some random history question when stopped out of the blue on the way to work. Your brain is occupied with far more important things to your life than whatever some random person is asking you.
The flip-side of this is when you get “tour guides” who don’t live locally, and apparently just make shit up.
We were in Orlando a few months ago. The “tour guide” had a thick accent (Central European) and made some pretty dubious claims. I asked her where she was from and how long she had been in Florida.
Less than six months. :rolleyes: Yet she was an “expert”.
The explanation is quite simple. The local people have never read the tourist brochures, so they may even be unaware of the existence of things that visitors are eager to see.
Or similarly, the OP may have said “Boston Harbor” meaning the nearest waterfront. The people being asked may have thought he meant a specific place where the ships come in.
Or when you are on a peninsula in the harbor, there may be more than one way to the waterfront.
Yeah, that annoys me too. That and the people who rant about cashiers who can’t instantly make your change. I was a cashier, and I’m pretty smart but it never failed to annoy me when customers gave me some obscure amount and expected me, instantly to know what the change is. Look, you only had that one transaction today - I had hundreds. I’m tired and any front-facing job is wearing on the soul. I don’t really care that you can do all that math in your head. Good for you! No need to mock the poor low level employee.
Jesus Christ people, it’s Boston Fucking Harbor that he’s talking about, not some obscure little attraction sought out only by a few dedicated tourists. I’ve been to Boston three times in my life, for a total of about 12 nights, and i reckon i could tell you what direction the harbor was in from most places in the city. I could understand if the OP was asking for something more specific and obscure like the American Antiquarian Society or the Museum of Fine Arts. But the idea that someone who’s lived there for decades, and who works within eight blocks of the water, doesn’t know how to get to the harbor is pretty bizarre.
To be quite frank, i’m also quite astounded at how many people are claiming ignorance of their own cities. I’ve lived in a bunch of places in my life, on three continents, and i could tell you the way to many of the biggest landmarks and tourist locations in every single one of them, even in cases where i haven’t actually visited the place myself.
I lived in San Diego for about two years before i ever set foot on the USS Midway, but i could have given you directions to get there easily. It was over four years before i visited the San Diego Zoo, but i knew how to get there. I’ve still never been to Seaworld, but i could easily give you driving directions. When i lived in Sydney, which has a harbor considerably larger than Boston’s, i probably could have pointed you to the closest water access from just about anywhere in the city.
I think some people just go through half their life in a little fog, barely paying any attention to their surroundings.
I grew up in Boston. While most locals would have heard of Boston Harbor there was not much reason to go to the harbor itself. “Where are you going?” “The harbor.” “Why? Does it not smell bad enough at home?”
If you had asked for the Boston Harbor Hotel, Northern Avenue, the ICA, etc., you might have found that people had a general idea of which direction they’re in. Those are places people go.
Good rule of thumb on the east coast - go east and you’ll reach the ocean soon enough.
Between you and your wife, you couldn’t figure out which way east was?
Am I missing something here?
That’s nice, and I’m glad you can do it. My husband can do this too. I cannot.
Can you please stop and listen to us for a minute? Better yet, read “Inner Navigation” by Erik Jonsson. A great read on how our minds are wired differently.
Cause they are. I don’t have an internal map. I can’t tell you the directions to places I’ve been, necessarily, let alone directions to places I haven’t even been. I’ve lived in a bunch of different places, too - I’ve moved a lot and that doesn’t help things.
Over the years my husband and I have talked and we really have different minds. I find he literally has a map and a compass in his head at all times. Me, I don’t. When I picture my city in my head, I picture parts of it - the parts I know well. The others are fuzzy or blank spots.
I know I am not any dumber than him. In fact I am better-read and have a better vocabulary. But he is more spatially oriented. That’s just how it is.
I thought Madame Tussauds was on Baker Street (apparently it’s on Marylebone Road, but the nearest tube station is Baker Street.) But I couldn’t have given walking directions to there.
I’d seen the bus stops, but didn’t know where to buy tickets (nor where any of the routes went.)
I’ve lived in and around DC my entire life (but for a brief time out on Maryland’s Eastern Shore), and while I know precisely how to get almost anywhere in the area from anywhere in the area, I’m not the person you want to ask for directions. Not because I don’t know the way, but I have an awful habit of first sending people the wrong way, only to come up with the correct way as soon as the people asking for directions have left. I don’t do it on purpose, I guess the GPS in my head is just a little slow.
I know how to get there. I could lead you there. I’m just saying, I can’t tell you how to get there.
Surely there is something you know how to do perfectly well, but you could not tell someone else how to do it. Think of it like that.
Here’s an example. There is a senior living complex less than eight blocks from my house. I can see its high-rise component from my top story, and I walk my dog by it all the time. But to get there you have to follow a street that winds around, then turn right onto another street, then turn into the place. It’s easy. But if you’re driving there, it’s not intuitive due to streets that don’t go through. Also, it has a street address, but from the nearest arteries you can’t turn directly onto either the street it’s on or the cross street.
So to tell someone how to get there, I need to know the name of the street you turn right on, which I don’t as its name has no meaning to me. The street that winds around starts with one street name (which I do know) and then changes to another which, sure, I ought to know, but it’s not something I need to know, so I don’t know it. Just off the top of my head, I don’t recall if it’s the third intersection or the fourth, although I know there’s a stop sign there. Hence, it would be easier for me to lead someone there.
Because it is kind of confusing, I’ve been asked how to get there a couple of times. And I do my best. But it’s happened that the person who asked for directions then drives by me again a couple of minutes later, still lost. At this point, yeah, I want to hide. I feel like a failure, even though I’m not the one who is lost.
Oh, PS, I live here. I was just trying to think what are major landmarks, to someone who doesn’t live here. I don’t even know. There are some mountains, they’re to the west. To get there, take I-70 and head west. To find I-70, it depends where you’re starting from. There are many other ways though, depending on where you’re starting from.
Right - you have been a tourist in the city and went to a tourist thing. The people in the restaurant aren’t tourists, and so probably only go to tourist things in other cities. They have a route they take to work, and come home from work late at night (not ideal harbor touring time) so don’t memorize the way to walk from work to the harbor since it’s not a thing they ever actually want to do.
Also, while the ‘they were idiots/in a fog/whatever’ crowd likes to insult the wait staff for not knowing something so allegedly obvious, you all seem to ignore that the OP and his wife were not able to figure out the way to the place THEY WANTED TO GO on their own. If the people working were in some way deficient for not being able to pop out directions, the OP and his wife are even more deficient for not being able to find it when it was their objective.
It seems that you spend a lot of brainpower memorizing the directions to places you don’t go. Other people have other priorities, and acting like it’s some kind of personal failure not to memorize directions to random locations that you don’t go to makes no sense whatsoever to me.
Recalled to mind, a time-honoured English anecdote. A couple or more centuries ago, an English aristocrat is travelling in his personal carriage through a remote part of the west of England, trying to reach a particular small town. On his being informed by his coachman and other underlings, that there are problems concerning routeing / their whereabouts – noticing an elderly local seated by the roadside and watching the world go by, they stop and seek advice. The noble lord starts off: “Here, fellow ! What’s the way to Town X?”
The old chap – likely, with his back put up by the rude and peremptory mode of address – gives a response which is neither clear nor informative. Exchange between the noble lord and him, quickly escalates – with the former becoming progressively more irritated and verbally aggressive, and the latter increasingly playing dumb. Finally the noble lord – exasperated almost beyond bearing – exclaims; “Don’t you know anything, you stupid fellow?”
The rustic responds: “Maybe Oi be stoopid, master; but Oi knows where Oi be, which is more than can be said for ‘ee.”