A few years back I wrote a column about how annoying it was to get driving directions from a child: I said it was like dealing with a living pirate map. “You drive to the big tree—no, not that one, the big one…okay then, the second biggest one, whatever—and it’s the third house after the house with the little dog. Well, there’s usually a little dog there. Why are you grinding your teeth like that?” In fact, I think I said something at the time about how there was absolutely nothing more annoying—how it was, as far as I was concerned, the epitome of annoy. Well, a few years have passed since then, and I am unhappy to report that I was wrong: there is something more annoying than getting driving directions from a child, and that is giving driving directions to them.
That’s right: the child who used to give me the “Treasure Island”-style directions is now driving herself places, and it would appear that she wants to receive directions from me in exactly the same manner she herself used to give them: with obscure landmarks and cryptically vague distances. (My favorite is “It’s about halfway down.” Halfway down what? The street? The continent? The planet?) Here’s a typical scenario: the child needs to get somewhere and asks me how. I respond by giving her the address. Deep sigh from said child. “No, Mom. Just tell me where it is.” And so I try to explain cross streets. Again with the sigh, and again with, “Just tell me where it is.” At this point I know that it is useless, but I pull out a map anyway. This pushes the child right over the edge. “Why won’t you just tell me where it is?”
That’s when I realize (yet again) that “where it is” means “what is it next to.” And also that “what is it next to” means “use landmarks that are relevant to me, not you.” So that saying “it is next to the courthouse” is as meaningless as a street address, whereas “across from that alley where your friend Bobby John once threw up two nights in a row” is the gold standard. Of course, the fact that I didn’t know about the Tour de Puke, and have, in fact, never even heard of Bobby John, is, to her at least, irrelevant.
Probably the most frustrating aspect of all of this is the fact that it would be a non-issue if she would just learn how to read a map; this is especially aggravating considering the fact that I had to spend hours and hours of my life listening to Dora the Explorer when she was a child. Hours that I will never get back. What was the point of all of those times I was forced to yell “Swiper no swiping!” if they weren’t even going to learn how to read a map? What was the point of all those sleepless nights spent wondering why the monkey wore boots, but no pants (at least he didn’t wear a raincoat) if the payoff wasn’t going to be just a little bit of cartographic literacy? I mean, Cyber Chase was annoying, too, but at least there they learned the difference between a rectangle and a square.
Although, now that I think about it, the maps in Dora were pretty much pirate-style, too, which actually may explain the map reading disability they all carry today. If only Map had, one time, just given Dora a street address. If only, one time, Backpack had ever said, “Hey kid, you ever hear of Google?” Oh, well. I suppose it could be worse. After all: at least they all still managed to grow up wearing pants.