I’ve a friend who can’t follow directions to save his life.
Every time, it’s just a migraine trying to figure out how this guy manages to get through life.
Like once he was taking his kids to the MN zoo, from north west of the twin cities.
“Okay, so you’re gonna to want to come down 94, take 494 south to 35W south, go to McAndrews Road- you’ll see the brown signs for “zoo”, so you can just follow those, but’ll go left on McAndrews and the zoo is on the left a bit down the road- you’ll see the big signs and tiger and stuff.”
He takes 694, instead of 494, goes around until it becomes 494, and around some more until he’s back on the north side before he decides to call.
He’s back where 494/694 on that side do the merge thing and go to 94 proper.
We get him onto 694, which would also connect him to 35w, he’d just go through the city is all.
He panics or something and gets on hwy 100. Okay. No big deal, take that to 494, take 494 to 35W,
Somehow misses the 100/494 interchange despite literally working at that exit for 3 years…
Gets dumped onto Normandale BLVRD, and instead of realizing maybe something’s wrong, (gee not a higway anymore…) he gets angry because my instructions are “too complicated” and “they keep changing”, and “why did I give him directions if I don’t know the roads?!”.
Meanwhile his GPS in the background has given up giving him directions.
He’s pissed because his kids are frustrated they don’t actually get to the zoo, because he can’t follow directions through an area he should actually know because he’s lived here is entire life.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 4 months ago
In my experience, people with “bad GPS” tend to disregard the GPS directions because they think they know better. Once they are good and lost, and the GPS is frantically trying to reroute is about when they start to complain that the GPS is useless.
GraniteM@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Not GPS, but I found myself waking up in the back seat of a car when some friends and I had driven all night to catch a Violent Femmes concert in Pittsburgh. The sun was coming up and they hadn’t found our motel. This was in the days of printed MapQuest directions.
I asked “Did you follow the directions from where they started?”
They said “We don’t need to start from there, we’ve already been there!”
I said, “Let me fuggin drive.”
So I get behind the wheel and start back tracking to the previously established starting point while they say over and over that we don’t need to start from there, they already know that spot, they just need to drive around a little longer and they’ll get there eventually.
And then I followed the directions, to the letter, from the starting point on the directions, right straight to the motel.
So the moral of the story is always follow the directions and don’t try to improv that shit, because you’ll find yourself lost in Pittsburgh.
Also, holy shit, Pittsburgh is laid out on a triangle rather than a rectangular grid, and that will throw you right the fuck off your sense of direction if you’re not familiar, which none of us were.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 months ago
I’ve definitely had some bad experiences with GPS.
Telling me which way I need to go far too late. Too late to get into the right lane to take the manoeuvre it recommends.
Misunderstanding the lanes so it seems to be telling me to take the next left, when what it actually means is continue straight at not just the next fork, but the fork after that, and then take the next left. (Seriously. This exact scenario happens so reliably to me on one major route near me that I’ve learnt to expect it.)
Routing me through a rat run of minor residential streets when the major roads aren’t even close to congested. Often involving an unprotected, unsignalled right turn across traffic to get back onto main roads, where I have to just hope there’s a gap in traffic in both directions at once. There are a few places it likes to do this that I’ve learnt to avoid, but that’s in cases where I’m not really relying on GPS for navigation per se, but to find which of the multiple routes I should take today (and because having GPS on is the only way to get it to show me GPS speed and enable the convenient podcast controls).