Helping the directionally challenged

I was talking with a father the other day who was upset that his daughter uses GPS to get back and forth to work even though she knows the route.

The argument was that “kids these days” can’t get anywhere without technology.

I’ve got news for him: Kids aren’t the only ones.

I spent the first half of my adult life driving in circles anytime I went more than, oh, 20 miles from home. It is no secret in my family that I have the absolute worst sense of direction: Blindfold me, spin me around once, and see if I can find my way back home from anywhere other than the local Walmart.

Quick answer: I can’t.

Heck, you wouldn’t even have to blindfold me.

I was bemoaning this to a friend who insists nobody can be so directionally inept. He argues that I lack self-confidence, that if I had to find my way without strict instructions from Google Maps, I could.

I won’t quibble that confidence, or a lack thereof, plays a role. But it comes from a lifetime of squashed expectations.

It doesn’t help that my directional challenges are coupled with a typical Y-chromosome trait: an aversion to asking for help. I loathe stopping at strange gas stations, where one member of a posse of local Einsteins tells me to get back on the highway — which always has two names, one from 30 years ago and a current one — and head “a couple clicks” down to Route Whatever that crosses over Interstate Wherever.

Once in a great while, these directions work. Usually, however, they led only to another gas station, or sometimes the same one again, where I had to supplicate myself before another tribunal of crusty old cartographers.

In the pre-Internet days, I would pore over maps before going anywhere, jotting down notes I could tape to the dashboard.

But real life doesn’t look much like a map. All those neatly drawn intersections and clearly labeled routes look great when peering down from a bird’s eye view. At street level, however, everything looks different. Distances are hard to calculate. Street signs are missing. Roads are closed.

In the early days of digital mapping, I printed turn-by-turn directions from Yahoo Maps. Then I printed return directions because I didn’t trust myself to just reverse the first set.

It worked most of the time. Explicit directions helped even a knucklehead like me get to within a couple of blocks of my destination. Then if I had to ask a gas station Jedi, it wasn’t so humbling to find out I needed to make just one more left turn.

The situation is even better now that I can punch an address into my phone and get real-time directions. “Turn here” and “merge in another half mile” are orders I gladly accept. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords, at least where driving is concerned.

But even now, in this best of directional worlds, my ineptitude sometimes asserts itself.

On a recent trip to Myrtle Beach, I typed in our destination and selected the preferred route. It took me from Alliance to South Carolina by way of Columbus, which any yokel but me knows is far out of the way.

It turns out Google Maps was trying to avoid a toll road by adding an extra two hours to the drive, a bad tradeoff that my wife hasn’t let me live down yet, especially because I didn’t recognize how wrong it was.

I guess those gas-station know-it-alls could have set me straight, if people like that are still around, and if they’re not too busy posting on Twitter or swiping right on Tinder to help a directionally challenged oaf find the ocean.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter