Murphy's World
Bad trip takes a turn for the worse
Dear Murphy,
Some bad directions I got from a receiver made no sense, so I pulled into a fast-food restaurant and called the guy. Same deal: Turn here, follow this road to the end, turn right, yadda blah.
So I followed the road to the end of the yellow lines, but it wasn’t actually the end of the road. It went through. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just kept going. I made it around about five hairpin curves when some guy in a house comes running at me pinwheeling his arms frantically.
“Driver! Stop!” he shouts. “You’re trying to get to [thus-and-such] aren’t you? That guy can’t give directions. The last guy made it around that next turn there, and it took three cranes to get his truck out of the ravine. Back up.”
So I had to back down three miles of twisty-turn country road with four-wheelers flying all around me.
Bent Out of Shape in Butte
Dear Bent,
I’m getting tense and my blood pressure is skyrocketing just thinking about backing down three miles of twisting, turning country roads. The four-wheelers flying around playing dodgeball only adds to the excitement.
You’ve uncovered one of the great unsolved mysteries of Murphy’s World. Over-the-road professionals think dispatchers give the worst directions in the world. Wrong! Receivers give the worst directions, and dispatchers pass them along and embellish them, unless, of course, you get them straight from the horse’s mouth, which is what happened in this case. Why can’t receivers, who presumably drive to the drop-off location every day, give decent directions? In Murphy’s World, some things just can’t be explained. It’s part of the mystery, the aura, dare I say the charm of the place.
OK, forget that last part. There’s nothing charming about driving down an inescapable rat hole just because some guy in receiving can’t tell a driver how to get from here to there. We always look for bright spots in Murphy’s World stories, though, and yours came in the form of the good Samaritan who warned you before you went a turn too far. Thanks to the receiver and his messed up sense of direction, it sounds like that Samaritan stays pretty busy.
Regards,
Murphy and Lucky Dog
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