The woman on the other end of the phone just couldn’t understand. Not because she didn’t speak good English, but because she had no perspective on what I was trying to relate to her.
“How can something be south and west at the same time?” she said after I gave her the address of the sick friend I was trying to send flowers to.
“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing that confusion was not unusual when anyone in Utah gives someone from somewhere else an address to send something to.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Is this right? Is it really 6501 South 800 West (not the real address), or did I get it wrong?”
“Okay let me explain this,” I said, trying to keep my patience, wishing she would just enter it in the computer just like I said it. “Do you understand latitude and longitude? You know that thing you learned about maps and how to find locations in probably the seventh grade?”
“Alladintude and alongatude?” she asked. “What is that?”
I was at my end.
“Please just put down the address I told you and the flowers will get there,” I said.
Systems differ
Sound familiar? There are some other places in the United States where the address layout in a state or city is similar to how most of the towns in Utah are laid out, but most locales use different kinds of addressing systems. Many more times than the one example I explained above I have tried to explain to people from other places how the addressing system works in Utah. If they understand latitude and longitude, it is pretty easy. If they have no clue it is a lot harder for them to grasp the concept.
Many are often used to a system that uses street names, often without numbers attached to them. Go to some cities and metro areas and the addresses were made up as they went 200 years ago, with no real plan. An Elm Street might have numbers, but those numbers do not correspond to east, west, north or south but instead just a place on what may be a road that winds in all different directions as it flows. Rhyme or reason only makes sense when you understand that particular street. So the idea of using a GPS to find something in that case makes a lot of sense.
But that is also the problem these days. Despite having maps everywhere in both paper and in on-line formats, there are many people who cannot read a map or even care to do so. They just put the address in their phone or their vehicles navigation system and a sweet little voice guides them to where they want to go. The art of map reading is dying among the general population.
It’s important
Some would say it isn’t important. But the fact is that old forms of navigation are still viable, particularly when technology fails or is non-existent. Hikers in the back country are often cautioned not to only rely on their phones or electronics for navigation. We have all heard the stories of someone who uses a GPS to navigate themselves onto a road that ends in a snowy morass that they have no way of getting out of. The old ways of paper maps and compasses still works. Shooting the stars with a sextant to navigate can still be effective. Understanding where the sun sets and where it rises, depending on the time of year, can still give one a pretty good sense of direction. Even knowing that moss grows predominantly on the north side of trees (in the northern hemisphere, but on the south side when you pass over the equator) is good information to have.
I am all for modern technology, but losing the old ways of doing things that can be life saving or at least can replace a failure in the most modern systems could lead to disaster at times. It’s like teaching kids math with a calculator, without them understanding the operations that are going on when they multiply variables or divide fractions. What happens when they need to do it themselves on a piece of paper with a pencil when the need arises?
The easy way to do things makes us lazy and often causes some people to ridicule those who still use past practices. But knowing the more difficult way, the way that is the basis for a new technology’s message or result, is like knowing how to swim if you fall in a lake off a boat when you don’t have a life jacket on.
Without the jacket, and not knowing how to stay afloat, drowning is almost a sure thing.
Aladdintude and alongitude won’t get you to the right place
Richard Shaw