Someone came by to visit a few weeks ago. Addresses and directions around here can be confusing to anyone unfamiliar with the area, so I’ve assumed a habit of giving unusually detailed instructions for how to get here from the subway.

It is not far at all but one wrong turn will send you on a ½ hour commute to and from nowhere you need to be.

We were meeting to conduct an interview for an NPR radio show. I don’t like doing interviews. She knew this. Time was tight for both of us, and I am a crank when it comes to media spots.

Planning to be here at 4pm she called around 4:20pm.

Her voice sounding exasperated she explained that she had used the “Directions” product offered by a certain search engine. When she exited the subway this product sent her completely the wrong way. When she arrived here she was abjectly apologetic, saying “You wrote out such detailed directions but Google told me to go completely the opposite direction.”

She ended up using my directions instead of Google’s.

Why?

Because when it comes to getting the 3 blocks from the subway to my apartment building I know what I am talking about. I am not a zombie robot with ads slapped on his forehead (oh, wait).

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that this happened to them. And yet these same people keep using the “Directions” product offered by this company.

It has to be that it works much of the time, maybe only some of the time, or maybe it never works at all and people keep returning to it as some form of technology-infatuated self-flagellation.

At a wedding a couple of years ago 3 of the 6 couples at the table described getting hopelessly lost en route to the event. What did these couples have in common? They all used this company’s “Directions” product.

2 of the couples said they got accurate directions from gas station employees. The other couple I don’t remember how they eventually found their way.

The point being: If it’s a web product that does not work, then that’s just the way it is. We will use this non-functional product, we will get lost, and we will like it. We will come back for more bad directions the next time we assume that paper maps and simple planning are for luddites and losers.

No communication channels exist between the big searchies and you, their products (that’s a nod to old meme that if you are not paying for web content then you are the product being sold to advertisers). We are the Internet’s product being sold.