aqueerkettleofish:blacktwittercomedy:Black Social Comedy I used to deliver food in the pre-GPS days.
aqueerkettleofish:blacktwittercomedy:Black Social Comedy I used to deliver food in the pre-GPS days. There was a set of maps that let you look up where a street was, and the street on the map was labeled with street number ranges. It helped that it was a really small service area.It did NOT help that some roads had multiple names, and there were two roads in my service area named “Montgomery Highway” and one named “Old Montgomery Highway”, whose residents still referred to it as “Montgomery Highway”.The one that amazes me though? Old-school AAA.I moved from St. Petersburg, FL to Charlotte, NC blind– my job moved, I went with it, found the apartment online. And this was before even MapQuest was a thing, so if you wanted navigation instructions, you went to AAA. (Brief unpaid ad: If you have a car, you need AAA. If you regularly travel with someone who does not have AAA, you need AAA. At one point I had AAA for my fourteen year old daughter, and it ended up saving her bacon (as well as the bacon of the family of the friend she was hanging out with). If not AAA, a good roadside assistance club.)And in these days, going to AAA wasn’t a website, it was an office building downtown with a LIBRARY of maps, where a little old lady would get the address you were looking for, walk away, and come back twelve seconds later with a booklet of maps she had assembled and bound for you, at which point she would sit with you while she went through each page and highlight the exact route, and make notes about exits, and at least one point she would stop and say… “okay, heads up, this is a speed trap. Avoiding this area would add a half-hour to your route, so here’s what you do– when the speed limit drops to 45, you drop to 35, because you will NOT be able to slow to 35 between the time you see that sign and the time you get pulled over. And here’s another one– there’s a whole-ass tree in front of the sign, so just slow down to 45 for this whole section…”It is important to note that the AAA office in question was in FLORIDA, and the speed traps she was talking about were in Georgia and South Carolina. And in both cases, they were in the “get from the major highway to the other major highway by taking this shortcut through the backwoods” areas– places that knocked an hour off the trip despite being a one-and-half-lane road that doesn’t even appear on all the maps.I think about that old lady sometimes, and I wonder what she’s doing now, in the age of Google Maps. Because I’m pretty sure she’s an immortal oracle of some sort. -- source link