You Are Here

For years one of my proudest possessions was kept in a small cardboard box on the top shelf of my office. In it were clean, correctly folded, up-to-date gas station maps of our area and surrounding states. As inspirational as the Bible, as pithy as Shakespeare, as revealing as Playboy, they were the key to going and coming on trips for business or pleasure. I was taught to read them by my father, and looked forward to passing on both the documents and skills needed to appreciate them to our boys once they were old enough to get it.

But then GPS happened. And almost overnight anyone, directionally challenged or not, could find his or her way from here to there. No judgement calls of local vs. express, no understanding of cloverleaf interchanges, no parsing of advantages of highways over parkway was needed. All one need do was to enter a destination and follow the step-by-step instructions. And before you could say "toll booth" it told you that you had arrived.

But whether you prefer Google maps or Waze, odds are you have had little use of either the past year. And that's because you haven't gone anywhere. Or more correctly, your world has been so limited and the routes so prescribed that there has been no need of guidance, electronic or otherwise. After all, repetition has meant that you could drive your weekly route to the grocery store blindfolded. And routing around traffic ties ups meant passing a garbage truck.

That doesn't mean you didn't have a world to map. It's just that your destinations were, well, off road. It's kind of like when you look at that big green park on the screen. In a car the only routing is to go all around the edge. But plunge through the middle on foot, and you encounter all means of shortcuts and detours, obstacles and attractions, none of which show up on the plot. 

Your stomping grounds of the last year are much the same. And while the routes might be constrained, there are good ones and bad ones. There are busy thoroughfares to avoid, quiet lanes that are welcome respite, and unplanned detours that bring you past either a welcome distraction or an accident in the making.

To be sure this will vary depending on the size of your space. Live in a one-bedroom apartment, and the options and differentials are small. One side of the couch might be the conference room, the other the break room. The route from the loading dock (the front door) to the supply room (the coat closet) may not have a whole of options. And the webinar control room looks suspiciously like the nap room, hopefully not at the same time.

If you have a home with multiple rooms the options grow. The route from your office (the den) to the mailroom (the table in the foyer) might take you via the school (the family room where your kids are online for class) or through the gym (that would be the dining room where there is a stationary bike in the corner). And just like work, a trip to the bathroom means you might get snagged for an unplanned task, though it's less likely to be a budget review as a request to take out the garbage.

As with any environment, all roads lead to a coffee pot. Unless you live in a mansion, odds are that's also your kitchen, the same place where you and your family prepare and eat most of your meals. That's a plus because when you open the refrigerator or cupboard you don't see a bunch of bags with people's names on them. It's a minus for the same reason, as there is nothing stopping you from grabbing the leftover ziti or piece of cake. And you wonder where that quarantine 15 came from.

It may be a shrunken world, but it's yours. You may not need a screen to plot it, but the routes are there none the less. And you may not need to crowdsource where you'll hit a radar trap, or in this case, a request to fix the toilet, but they're out there, too. It calls to mind comedian Steven's Wright observation: "I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it."

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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes to know where things are. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.