We live busy lives. Some of us have busier lives than others. We often make appointments days, weeks, or even months in advance. When recording an appointment, we write down the person’s name, reason for meeting, location of the meeting, in addition to the date and time. If you’re like me, you have the name, time, and reason written down on a calendar. Many of us expect to retrieve the driving directions on the day of travel. This practice of scheduling and Just In Time trip planning sounds perfectly reasonable to most people. That is until you discover the interenet is NOT available when you need it most. I had this experience today.
The night before, I reviewed the upcoming meeting time and location. I knew the meeting was going to be in San Mateo around Noon at the Fish Market. I figured the approximate departure time and planned to retrieve the directions while I was getting ready to leave.
Technical Challenge:
On the day of the appointment internet access was not available. I couldn’t look up the directions to my destination as I had planned. It looked like the meeting might be a disaster. The only thing that saved me was internet access on my phone. I was able to l0okup the address. It wasn’t as nice as on my computer, but it at least it showed me a map of the area. I knew it was really close to the intersection of San Mateo Bridge and Bayshore Freeway. Fotunately, I made it to the meeting without getting lost.
Lessons learned:
- Lookup the directions to an appointment as soon as you make the appointment. You can write down the directions in your phone using notepad.
- Don’t rely on the internet. It’s not always there when you need it.
- Have traditional mapping methods on hand when you’re traveling. You never know when you’ll need to find an alternate route.
