Did You Try, You Know, Reading Them?
Our old house was ridiculously hard to find. The entrance was easy to drive past, it had a series of apartments next to it, and four houses all split off from the path that came to our house.
Whenever I ordered pizza, I checked how well the driver had been able to find the house, and I kept adding instructions until I had about three paragraphs accurately guiding people down the right paths, giving them a clear location to park, and listing three different ways to identify if you were going down the wrong stairs, including the fact that the closest stairs you could mistakenly go down were attached to a car-port.
Once I got it to this length, most drivers commented happily how useful it was since it saved them a lot of messing around, or they at least found us very rapidly without knocking on the other house we were attached to.
This only failed me twice. The first time, I was absolutely certain that the driver wasn’t quite at reading level in English, which was fair, and he was sweet and only a little lost. The second one, though…
He went down the wrong stairs, complained when I corrected him, basically had very little interest in coming down to the correct area, and made me come up to meet him. The kicker, though, was his parting line.
Delivery Driver: “Why do you have so many directions on your place? It’s so easy to find.”
I didn’t see that guy again. I didn’t make a complaint because he made it to me in the end. However, the next driver was once again grateful for the instructions. It’s only you, mystery driver.