Oh man… I’m dyslexic so basically without GPS I’m constantly confused.
I worked for a weird IT company called AllSafe J/K AllCovered™ that really leaned into their homegrown dispatch software. And it was pretty impressive… but it relied on the GPS in our Dell laptops, which was not so hot inside a Ferriday cage, or frankly even sitting on top of a car, so I remember having a Thomas Guide, and several other paper maps that I would try desperately to use to find the next client location.
It was almost never the same client twice so learning a route was basically impossible. I got shitcanned for bitching out my supervisor, who didn’t know he was my supervisor, because none of us knew who each other were. Good-fuck, social engineering would have been a piece of cake back then.
__hetz@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
I still grab the latest highway maps from rest stops. What I haven’t seen, that used to be in almost every gas station and convenience store, were the multi-page county atlases. Damn things would set you back $15-20 a pop but you’d look up a street name, get the page and grid location, then work backward to whatever highway you were taking. We had a stack of them in my buddy’s work van and used them to get to everywhere. Navigating DC by paper map was an experience.
“ADC the Map People” made the ones for the DC/Maryland/Virginia area but stopped in 2010. It looks like they probably also made those massive wall maps used by the local pizza joints too. Doesn’t seem like anyone makes anything similar to them now. Makes me wonder what LEO/Fire/EMS does now; they used to all carry atlases for their service area - even just as a fallback after GPS became widely available.