cafetiere for the painfully aware

[devi]

There's gonna be a hangin' today.

Sarah of the Fringe is going to be here shortly to drive me and a bunch of paintings down to the Jacqueline Du Pré Music Building, one of the exhibition venues. I should probably not have stayed up late last night randomly drinking vodka and sending emails and then standing out on the balcony listening to the city in the still night. I feel a bit woolly now, but it was very nice. On the phone Sarah pointed out that the directions I was giving to my house all used pubs as landmarks. It's a fair cop.

But something I've been wondering about for a long time: why do most people seem to give directions of the "third left, then fourth right, then two more lefts, then take a right and five more lefts and you're there" variety rather than using street names, pub names or whatever? The latter method is clearly superior! In the first method all the instructions are dependent on your having got all the previous ones right, and if you make one mistake you're lost. Whereas in the second method, if you come to a confusing junction you can at least tell that you've definitely got the route right up to that point because, well, there's the Original Swan. Which is much less confusing than trying to work out if something counts as one of the twenty-seven "lefts" or not.

And do other people find it easy to hold a long sequence of turnings in their heads and be sure they've remembered it accurately? I know I don't. Those same people often say "But I don't remember street names" when I ask for any landmarks on the route. But street names are much more memorable! I am confused.

Comments

[mrs-leroy-brown.livejournal.com]

Dude, you are Wholly Correct in your directions-giving sense. I always panic when people use words like 'left' or 'south'. Just tell me what pub or shop is on the corner, etc. That makes all the sense!

[jinty]

'South' can be a good way of giving directions, in the right situation. In grid-based Manhattan it's a nice unambiguous instruction that users can readily understand (very easy to tell north and south just by looking up in most cases). I wish my GPS could tell me to go north or south sometimes, especially where there's big roadsigns saying 'the North'!