• chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I did this before cellphone and any sort of digital maps. It was hell. I memorized my city, that wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was the people who didn’t have their houses properly labeled with their address. Bonus points if they left their porch light off, as well.

    “Why is my pizza cold?”

    “Because I had to use complex mathematics to derive your house number among all of the unnumbered houses on your street.”

    • poppy@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      ”Because I had to use complex mathematics to derive your house number among all of the unnumbered houses on your street."

      Wouldn’t even be able to do that in the neighborhood I grew up in. They numbered the houses in the order they were built/the lots were purchased and that wasn’t often next to each other lol. So 64, 67, 88, 90 are next to each other for instance.

        • poppy@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          Wasn’t on any sort of grid pattern either. The roads just kinda meandered around willy nilly and would sometimes loop back on itself with random “bridge” connecting roads which I know isn’t extremely uncommon but definitely added to the difficulty of navigation.

            • poppy@lemm.ee
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              8 months ago

              You got some right! All 60s-70s houses. Mine was split level. Decidedly middle class. However, it was smack in the Midwest and basically all the houses are about as different as houses built in that era can be. Now, the subdivision that popped up in the field next to my neighborhood in the 00s were cookie cutter 3-4 of the same houses (but sometimes the floor plans/elevations were mirrored to make it seem different haha).

    • jawa21@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 months ago

      The misnumbered/not numbered houses is still a big issue. GPS can only be relied on to get you in the general area, and even then sometimes it points you to the middle of a field.

      My real gripe is apartments. People will often fail to give you the apartment number and even if they do, every single complex has their own numbering system and layout. There is one complex near here where the signs on the buildings are completely illegible at night due to the lights above them casting shadows. I hate having to go there.

    • MIDItheKID@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I delivered pizza for a few years in my early years, and poorly lit addresses were the absolute worst. I was delivering in the pre-smartphone but post mapquest era, and we had a computer in the shop with a touch screen (which was crazy at the time) map on it so you could figure out where we were going. But God forbid you ended up on a one way street looking for an address that was poorly labeled or unlit and you got somebody behind you laying on their horn… At some point I bought a 1000 candle spotlight that I used at night, and that got me pulled over several times because people would call the police about “a slow driving car shining a spotlight out of its window”… Like… For fucks sake. I’m just trying to deliver some pizza.

      With that said, while working I smoked a bunch of weed, listened to a bunch of good music, and generally got tipped well so… It was a good time.

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Nothing changed drove for Grubhub for awhile. Google maps isn’t 100% correct and the amount of customers expecting food to be delivered with their porch lights off and no numbers on their homes. It was a shit show.

    • Digestive_Biscuit@feddit.uk
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      8 months ago

      I had to visit a house the other week in a place I hadn’t been before. Sat nav got me to the post code just fine only but the problem is it’s one of those villages on a long road where everyone thinks they are special and don’t need house number. Instead they all have names. It’s horrid! Driving up and down real slow, blocking the road, while I read every bloody house name.

      • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        There were a couple of times where I just turned around and went back to the store with the pizza and said no one was home. That would have been one of those times.