Thursday, July 10, 2008

Course Correction

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I recently went to the website of a fancy Manhattan restaurant, and it proved to be a textbook example of badly-written instructions/directions (one of my pet peeves, up there with signs whose arrows point in ambiguous directions).  The restaurant site had multiple paragraphs worth of instructions on how to walk there if starting from Midtown, essentially climaxing with the commandment to get onto the Street in question and keep going until reaching the building number (they refrained from saying “Put your left foot in front of your right foot…”) — yet in all of it, there was no reference anywhere to which Avenue is closest to the restaurant, which anyone with any familiarity with Manhattan knows should be about the third syllable in any set of geographic instructions here, as in “and Ninth.”

So now I hope they go out of business.  It’s the only way humanity learns.

I worry that more and more things are falling through bureaucratic cracks as the pace of society becomes faster — less time for people to stop and utilize reason.  Think, humanity, think.

At least the market provides more frequent, diverse, decentralized, and individualized feedback about errors than biannual, right-or-left, turn-the-vast-ship-of-state votes do, though (and thus speedier, more precise corrections — even now, customers may be making their way to a more easily located restaurant).  But tomorrow, in my second-to-last Retro-Journal entry, let’s take a look at one big recent electoral “correction,” the 2006 Republican loss of control of Congress.

3 comments:

jenny said...

you may want to avoid frankfurt main airport, then – it’s full of metal curves sporting signs with arrows that seem to point out the windows.

ANP said...

I didn’t know what to do when I saw a license plate with “THXS MOM” as its message. Steal it? That would make the mongoloid think that their abysmal misspelling was in demand. Ignore it? Well, then, how to communicate how I loathed their laissez-faire attitude re: spelling, and who gave them permission to be an ingrate, and why am I busting my a$$ over here trying to color within the lines when they are flagrantly, messily violating the obvious — which is that it is spelled THX or THKS but not THXS — without apology, without remorse, without any consideration for how I might feel that they are allowed to have a car in New York City while I have to huff and puff by on foot?!?!

Whoops, got a little carried away there.

Et voila:

http://flickr.com/photos/anp/sets/72157602278470726/

Todd Seavey said...

That’s funny.

A thought: One of the speakers at our event at Lolita Bar this coming Tuesday — Kerry Howley of _Reason_ magazine — wrote a piece about an artist who created “citation needed” stickers to put on signs that make groundless claims.

It would be a delightful change of pace if our lackadaisical culture suddenly decided it was hip to put culture-(un)jamming grammar-correction stickers on things (assuming no property damage, etc., etc.), if I may wax conservative for a moment, foshizzle (sic).