cafetiere for the painfully aware
Mar. 27th, 2008 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deviThere'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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 11:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 12:33 pm (UTC)Oh, I can totally sympathise with that! (I have good spatial awareness, it's just that the associated *words* get muddled)
Amusingly, my father and I muddle in exactly the same way - but he gives out enough non-verbal cues that I know when he means 'the other left'. Very confusing for my mother if I was driving, my father was navigating, and she was trying not to get car sick in the back when anticipating the directions my father was vocalising...
no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 12:53 pm (UTC)When driving or directing a driver, I usually use "