ArsGeek

It’s happening again. I’m constantly being mistaken for someone who knows where he’s going and how to get anywhere else in the world.

I work in a city. I do not live in the city. This means that I hop on public transportation from my home town, ride the train into the city, ride more trains to my job and then do the reverse on the way out. Other than how to get to my office or the train station, I’m functionally lost in the big city.

It doesn’t help that I’ve got absolutely no sense of direction and that I’m the person GPS location devices were made for. Give me a map and a compass or something hooked up to a bunch of satellites and I’ll be okay. Put me on my own and I’ll be calling you from a different state asking you which exit I want.

This shortcoming is constantly being compounded by the fact that I seem to be the only human being amongst a vast throng of people on campus whom other folks will approach for directions.

I’ll be walking through a crowd of a hundred when a tourist couple with a gaggle of children behind them will approach me and say something like “Excuse me, how do I get to the Smithson Building of Architectural Inequities?”. I’ll give them the inevitable lost look, shrug my shoulders and tell the that I’m sorry but I’ve no idea where I am, let alone where they are or how to get to where they’re going.

I’ll then put a look of quiet desperation on my face and wander off towards my next encounter with the habitually lost. Other than myself, I mean.

I’ve tried a number of techniques to discourage folks from approaching me. The music player with earphones pushed deep into my ear canals does nothing. Folks just touch me at that point. I’ve tried looking like a vaguely mad professor with limited success but I find that with vaguely mad looks, I simply attract a stranger breed of lost people. I swear that once a man approached me and asked me the quickest way to the Alps. Really, the Alps. My suggestion of dying and coming back as an Austrian met with limited favor. Or perhaps I misunderstood him.

For a while I attempted an angry scowl but I found that simply lead to people asking me from a further distance away. The only thing more awkward than giving someone directions when I’m lost myself is doing that across seven feet of embarrassed distance.

Is there a certain look that attracts people to ask for directions? Is the mustached and goatee’d occasionally bearded with glasses and shortish hair look what does it? Maybe it’s that I wear jeans a lot. Does that go far towards the friendly, sure-I’ll-miss-my-train-to-tell-you-how-to-get-there look?

This has been going on now for close to three years. There is not a day in the week when I don’t get stopped by some stranger looking for the easiest way to get to Avalon, or the quickest route to Nirvana. I’m at a loss now as to what to tell them. Perhaps it’s time I bought a map and started memorizing. Or I’ll purchase a T-shirt that says “I’m lost too!”

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