Skip to main content

Improved Driving Directions

For the driving directions challenged such as myself Google Earth would be just what the doctor ordered. I have been lost in new cities so completely that I seemed more likely to end up in the next state than at my destination a tantalizing ten blocks away. Direction-challenged-ness I'm sure is fairly common why else could there be GPS navigators in rental cars and directions through SMS

When someone asks me for directions to my place I do very well until I have to decide whether they would have to turn left or right relative to the direction from where they are coming from. Awkwardness could get no worse than when someone calls me from an intersection asking "Now what, left or right ?" and me saying "I'm not sure. But make a left see if you go past an Exxon and a BofA - they you're in the right direction" I cringe inwardly knowing the logical next question could be which side of the street the aforementioned landmarks would be seen. I have to admit not having a clue.

Most of my friends are aware of my deficient directional intelligence and find their way without any help (or is that hindrance) from me. They figure the effect of moving to the South from the North has rubbed off on me - as in "You can ask a Southerner for directions, but unless you already know the positions of key hills, trees and rocks, you're better off trying to find it yourself."

Labels

Labels:

Comments

bharath said…
feel sad for your friends :( you should improve or caution of lack of any assistance when lost. :))

yeah it will be nice to have technology that solves the problem and to have them every car. :)
1:21 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more