Giving Directions

A couple weeks ago, I was walking home after work in our neighborhood. Crossing a busy intersection, I was summoned by a distraught looking woman driver waiting for the stoplight. “Is this River Forest?” she asked. I heard her fine, but not believing someone would mistake the northwest side of Chicago for River Forest , I had her repeat the question. “Not even close,” I said. She was visibly upset. I asked where she wanted to go. “Dominican University.”

Given that the light was about to change, I did a pretty good job, I think, of giving her directions quickly. I kept the turns to a minimum, and steered her clear of the west side of Chicago. I even sent her off with some words of encouragement. But since then, I thought of a few things I could have done better. In the interest of self improvement I will list those here:

• Keep the sarcasm to yourself. “Not even close” was really uncalled for. “Sorry, no,” would have been just fine.
• Estimate the distance between turns. It would be three miles to her next turn, and four miles to the one after that. She obviously would not have known that. I could have spared her a lot of second guessing along the way.
• Better yet, draw a map! There’s a gas station at that corner where she could have pulled over. A map would have made a lot of things much clearer.