Monday, January 17, 2005
I had occasion to use Yahoo! Driving Directions to find my way to a store in Rockville today. Reading the directions to prepare for the trip, I noted the following:
"When using any driving directions or map, it's a good idea to do a reality check and make sure the road still exists, watch out for construction, and follow all traffic safety precautions. This is only to be used as an aid in planning."
This statement appears on all of its maps. The logic for Yahoo! is simple: A statement like this covers the company legally from anyone who gets lots or sent miles out of the way. If the shortest distance between two points is X, most of the online driving direction services appear to favor X+3. The 3 equals miles, minutes, or hours, depending on where you are going and how the service chooses to get you there.
The lawyers probably didn't anticipate the humorous aspects of the statement. What is a "reality check" in this case and how could it help someone looking for directions? Should the person doing this check consider going somewhere else? A place where he's been before? Most of us know at least one place that provides just about everything we want, need or desire. Often, new places offer nothing more than new scenery or placement of the same old stuff. Home Depot and Lowe's offer most of the same tools and hardware. The only difference between them is placement and the color of the employee's smocks (HD's are orange; Lowe's are blue).
Is the reality check suggesting something greater? Should it really read this way: If you are really going to the Internet, the greatest source for information and misinformation ever created, then you probably don't have any clue where you are going in the first place and you should probably consider doing something else? In my case, what the reality check could have been was this simple question: Did I really need the 22-by-28-inch canvases that are going to beautify my home office enough to require a trip to Rockville on a holiday Monday to get 10 more?
One also must wonder how often Yahoo! (and presumably the other services like it, including MapQuest and MapBlaster) send people to roads that no longer exist. Everywhere I go, except for the hills of Kentucky, more roads, often many more roads, are popping up. I'm sure the number of roads and cul-de-sacs (they used to be called dead ends) has doubled or more in the U.S. in the last 20 years. Think of every development that replaced a farm and the no-name dirt path from the main highway to the house. The new townhouse development has five or 10 roads, courts, drives, avenues, boulevards, streets, squares or terraces. Old roads like Route 40 and Route 1 have moved to the background, quite literally, as superhighways have taken over.
The Yahoo! directions I used to drive from Baltimore to Rockville, a 46-mile trip, weren't very good, leading me to question my decision to use them in the first place. That was a reality I could have predicted, but chose not to, even though Yahoo! had suggested it.
"When using any driving directions or map, it's a good idea to do a reality check and make sure the road still exists, watch out for construction, and follow all traffic safety precautions. This is only to be used as an aid in planning."
This statement appears on all of its maps. The logic for Yahoo! is simple: A statement like this covers the company legally from anyone who gets lots or sent miles out of the way. If the shortest distance between two points is X, most of the online driving direction services appear to favor X+3. The 3 equals miles, minutes, or hours, depending on where you are going and how the service chooses to get you there.
The lawyers probably didn't anticipate the humorous aspects of the statement. What is a "reality check" in this case and how could it help someone looking for directions? Should the person doing this check consider going somewhere else? A place where he's been before? Most of us know at least one place that provides just about everything we want, need or desire. Often, new places offer nothing more than new scenery or placement of the same old stuff. Home Depot and Lowe's offer most of the same tools and hardware. The only difference between them is placement and the color of the employee's smocks (HD's are orange; Lowe's are blue).
Is the reality check suggesting something greater? Should it really read this way: If you are really going to the Internet, the greatest source for information and misinformation ever created, then you probably don't have any clue where you are going in the first place and you should probably consider doing something else? In my case, what the reality check could have been was this simple question: Did I really need the 22-by-28-inch canvases that are going to beautify my home office enough to require a trip to Rockville on a holiday Monday to get 10 more?
One also must wonder how often Yahoo! (and presumably the other services like it, including MapQuest and MapBlaster) send people to roads that no longer exist. Everywhere I go, except for the hills of Kentucky, more roads, often many more roads, are popping up. I'm sure the number of roads and cul-de-sacs (they used to be called dead ends) has doubled or more in the U.S. in the last 20 years. Think of every development that replaced a farm and the no-name dirt path from the main highway to the house. The new townhouse development has five or 10 roads, courts, drives, avenues, boulevards, streets, squares or terraces. Old roads like Route 40 and Route 1 have moved to the background, quite literally, as superhighways have taken over.
The Yahoo! directions I used to drive from Baltimore to Rockville, a 46-mile trip, weren't very good, leading me to question my decision to use them in the first place. That was a reality I could have predicted, but chose not to, even though Yahoo! had suggested it.
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