The MapQuest Generation
Allow me to relate the following story to you.
I was working tonight at the store where I work, and some Middle Eastern guy came in to get directions to Roanoke. I was showing him the way on a map-which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, since he only half-spoke English and I never got around to taking Arabic in college, but that’s only tangential-and, at the end, he decided to buy the map. He asked me how much it cost. One of the girls (a seventeen-year-old) working at the Subway (located within the same building) had been trying to give him directions before I walked up, and she was still standing there at the store’s cash register. While I was folding up the map to find the price, she blurted out, “It should be free.” Being used to her saying weird, random things, I paid no attention to her and, upon finding the price on the map, told the customer that it would be $4.95 plus tax. The girl from Subway gasped, apparently in total disbelief that a map could be so expensive.
As I turned away to go back to doing the more core duties of my job, I ran across the other girl working in Subway, who also expressed disbelief at the map’s price. This made me pause. As I said, I am completely accustomed to the first girl’s naïvité-she’s not exactly the most cosmopolitan person in the world, to put it somewhat obliquely-but I consider the second girl to be more knowledgeable of the ways of the world. Bewildered, I asked, “What, do y’all never buy maps?” (Anyone who has ever bought a road map ought to know that $4.95 is a perfectly reasonable price for a map.) The first girl replied, “No, I always just put it in the computer.” The second girl added, “Yeah, I always just use MapQuest.” (My reply to all this was, “But Mapquest can’t help you when you miss your turn-off.” After thinking for a second, the second girl admitted, “Yeah, that’s true.”)
In the past, I have often bemoaned the fact that few people, born even so little as half a decade later than I, have ever really used cassette tapes, remember a life before the widespread use of the Internet and cell phones, or have even so much as seen a typewriter in real life, but I now see that the greatest loss will be something that I never fathomed could ever be lost: the humble road map.