Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Parking Lots

I got lost in a parking lot last week, for a while.

I do that all the time. I get distracted, I'm thinking about ten different things, and I wind up with only the vaguest notion of where I parked.

In a normal place, that's not a problem. In MichiCanada, though, it's a big mistake this time of year.

So I started thinking about it, and I came up with a solution. For me, at least, and if you have the same problem, maybe for you.

When I'm in a big parking lot, I never leave the car and angle to my location. I either walk across the rows, or down a row, but it's always a straight path. I've always done this, but I realized that could lead to a very simple method.

There are two different approaches.

If I walk down a row, when I reach the end of the row, I do a row count. When I come out, I just count to the row and walk up. It doesn't matter where my car is along the row, because I'll get to it eventually.

If I'm walking across rows, I count how many spaces I am from the end of the row. When I leave, I just count to that number, then start walking across. I'll run into it at some point.

Depending on what direction I exit, there's only one piece of information I need to remember. The other piece is really not important. I'm not finding an intersection anymore, I'm just finding a line. Somehow that's much less likely to fall out of my head, no matter what else is rattling around in there.

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