Large Fierce Mammal

I once had a lengthy relationship with a woman who gave directions so badly that even people intimately familiar with the place she was talking about could find no discernible similarity with real world conditions. She had the gift of completely sidestepping  the basic essentials required by people who are seriously trying to get from point A to point B, and substituting meaningless details that ignored such minutiae as the fact that right is not a substitute for left, towards is not quite the same as away, that a building is only useful as a landmark if it’s still standing, and the colour a house used to be is of less than no importance. As the result of a previous relationship she had also given birth to a son who, for an unfortunately significant part of his childhood, and no matter how often he was corrected, had his own gift of reliably misidentifying the shape of footwear so that he invariably put each of his shoes on the wrong foot every single time. Interestingly, this phenomenon also manifested itself in all of the five male children born to her four  sisters. The fact that I produced no offspring with this woman was not an accident.

I relate this anecdote as a lead in to today’s commentary on the giving of directions, and the fact that a disturbingly large and apparently increasing part of the population couldn’t find its own ass in the dark with both hands if every finger was a flashlight. Worse, the problem is not limited to individuals; it’s gone systemic to the point where it lives within the cultures of entire government departments the business of which is the giving of directions.

The Nova Scotia Department of Transportation is a case in point. Driving as I do all over the part of Hell’s half acre that lies within the coastal boundaries of that worthy province, it has not escaped my notice that the availability of signage providing useful information about one’s destination is directly proportional to one’s proximity to it so that as the distance left to go decreases so does the interest of sign painters in wasting their time talking about it. Many times in my own experience, this has led to situations in which a place that never failed to be mentioned on every highway sign I passed received less mention with every mile traversed until, apparently on its very doorstep, its existence as anything more than a cruel jest is cast into doubt.

Some years ago I was in Cape Breton with the intention of staying at the Glenora Inn and Distillery. The signs singing the praises of the place were thick on the landscape even before I crossed the causeway, and likewise after crossing it … for a bit. Little by little it became more often necessary to negotiate rural intersections based on little more than an educated guess that was only later vindicated by the sudden appearance of a sign smaller than the last confirming the right choice had been made. Until, that is, the road ended at a stop sign on a “T” intersection giving the option of right or left – to Mabou or Inverness, with no mention of Glenora and not even a zephyr to waft the guiding scent of glorious whisky which, as it turns out, was too mild to smell at the range of more than a foot anyway. In the end I found my target with the help of some local teenagers (a group that can always be relied upon to know where booze can be found) and the fact that Cape Breton is only so big.

On another occasion I had a professional appointment to meet with a woman who had provided me with her street address in the town of Bridgewater. In addition to her road name and civic number she had also provided other details including the colour of her house and its location virtually across the street from a major public building. I won’t name the building in question lest the woman involved be too easily identified, notwithstanding that she lived nowhere near it.

When I arrived in her alleged vicinity I discovered that there were a few issues adversely affecting my mission. Specifically:

1. The house located in the stated position relative to the aforesaid major public building had a five digit civic number rather than the two digit one provided; and
2. The house was not even close to the stated colour; in fact, nor was any other house anywhere near it.

Pulling into the parking lot of the major building, I phoned the woman and told her my dilemma. Armed with the results of this, and several more phone calls in which she provided still more uselessly inaccurate details, I finally located her. Truthfully, as soon as I realized the woman had no idea where she lived it all came together pretty quickly, and she’s still a client to this day.

So what was wrong with her directions? Beyond the fact that she did actually live in a house, everything. “Nearly across from” a major public building was actually half a kilometer in the wrong direction around a curve from which vantage the major public building wasn’t even visible. The civic number was actually five digits instead of two. The house was not the colour she’d described, not even close to it, and I’m not certain if it ever was. And while near the Town of Bridgewater, the house was not located in the Town of Bridgewater. When I finally met the woman I felt compelled to take considerable pains just to satisfy myself that she really lived there and wasn’t just some batty squatter like that other time.

To make matters even more exciting there’s Yarmouth County, which has embraced the bizarre practice of numbering houses and the rural mail boxes at the end of their driveways independently. It’s common there for people to post only one of the two numbers and then provide only the number they didn’t post to assist people in locating them. Worse, the number on the mail box may not actually be the mail box number but the civic number of the house instead, and it seems to be at the whim of the householder to decide which.

In reference to the getting of accurate information I recall a character in a Monty Python sketch saying, “Normally I would ask an officer of the law or a minister of the church rather than rely on the possibly confused statement of a passer by.” And yet, dear readers even such measures as these hold no guarantee of accurate reportage, and directions sometimes aren’t so much about how you get somewhere as they are about whether you should go at all.

About ten years ago I was an unwilling participant in a comedy of errors involving an ancient citizen of Lunenburg County, a provincial Home Care worker, a nurse from the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON), a fire rescue unit from a major Lunenburg County fire department, a provincial paramedic unit, and a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who is still serving and so shall remain nameless.

On the day prior to the one in which these events unfolded, I had personally been at the residence of said ancient citizen installing a medical emergency signalling system so that the elderly gent involved could call for help if he found himself in need of it and unable to reach or use the phone. Other than his age, and the fact that he was as deaf as my left boot, he was actually rather spry, but he lived alone and hence the concern for his well being.

On the following morning I was working the day shift in the Lunenburg Emergency Dispatch Centre which was operated by my company, and received a call from the Home Care worker who had just arrived at the house for a routine appointment. She excitedly informed me that she had forgotten her key and so could not get in, but that looking in through the window she had spotted the patient’s feet where he was apparently lying on his back on the kitchen floor. I knew with certainty that the man had not activated his emergency transmitter, but I consulted his file, told the Home Care worker to stand by, and reached a person on the man’s emergency contact list to see if they could help. As it turned out they were too far away to be of any immediate aid so I called the local office of the VON to find out if the nurse who normally attended to the man was anywhere nearby. As it turned out she was almost next door with plans to be at his house as her next stop. The only fly in the ointment was that when she arrived she found that she had forgotten her key as well.

Protocol at the time was to dispatch a paramedic unit, and if the anticipated response time exceeded 10 minutes, to also dispatch a fire rescue unit to stabilize the patient for transport by the ambulance when it arrived. This ended up being the case, and because of the obvious need for forced entry I also dispatched the RCMP, the member of which actually arrived first to meet the two distraught women who were fretting on the doorstep.

I had no direct radio contact with the RCMP so all communications had to be passed through their Halifax dispatch centre, callsign 416. A dispatcher from there called me shortly after their member arrived on scene and asked me if I had an ambulance on the way. I confirmed that I had both an ambulance and fire rescue unit responding, the latter of which was nearly there. She told me that I could tell them to stand down lights and siren because, “Constable <BLANK> reports that subject is, um, 10-6.”

Now I wasn’t about to do anything of the sort, but I wanted confirmation that the rumours of our man’s death were not being exaggerated. So I asked, “Are you saying that the man is actually deceased?”

“That’s my understanding yes,” the RCMP dispatcher replied, “But just stand by a sec.”

She kept the line open as she radioed her worthy member for confirmation:

416 Dispatcher: “Constable <BLANK> Four One Six.“

Constable <BLANK>: “Go ahead.”

416 Dispatcher: “I have Lunenburg Dispatch on the line and they’re looking for confirmation; is that subject actually 10-6 … um … deceased?”

Constable <BLANK>: (After a pause) “10-4.”

At that moment the crew of the fire rescue reported they had arrived on scene followed about 30 seconds later by the ambulance. Two minutes later the fire rescue crew reported they were clear of the scene and returning to the station.

With my bullshit detector going full blast I asked the crew of the fire rescue if they had a cell phone on board. They did and I asked them to call me. The call went like this:

Me: “So what happened there?”

Rescue: “Oh nothing. They had all the help they needed.”

Me: “Is the guy dead?”

Rescue: “No, he’s fine. I guess he was trying to make something to eat, he slipped on the floor but didn’t really hurt himself. They thought he tried to get up for a while but couldn’t and then he dozed off.”

Me: “Well that’s interesting considering the RCMP member who got there ahead of you wanted me to tell you to go non code because he was dead.”

Rescue: (Laughs) “No, when we walked in he was sitting at the kitchen table eating fish and chips.”

I had to conclude that the Constable involved had been out sick on the day the RCMP training depot traditionally teaches recruits the subtle difference between eating fish and chips and being dead.