The North 40: You could live at 48.598870 -109.946392

Despite the fact that GPS navigation systems are notorious for misdirecting drivers into all manner of wrong locations — like the Swiss driver who had to have his van and himself airlifted by helicopter off a goat trail in the mountains (hand to heart; I swear it’s true) because his GPS said it was the correct route, until he was stuck, when it said, “Oops, turn around and go back” — yes, despite even this, I think those of us who live in the country should use GPS latitude and longitude coordinates for addresses.

Of course, I know that means someone could end up living at something like County Road 254 #48.598870 -109.946392.

Yes, it’s a mouthful, but I swear it’s easier than trying to tell delivery and service people how to find my house which is like “right there” on the only highway in the United States of America that stretches, almost entirely intact, from coast to coast on the northern tier. It’s paved and everything, so it’s a big deal, this road. They still can’t find me.

You know who can find me? The regular mailman. That’s it.

But not the special delivery guys. They go to the neighbor’s house where the special delivery package can sit on the porch for days if the neighbors are gone because whoever entered the home addresses on Google Maps was asleep at the keyboard the day they entered data for my area. They swapped the one neighbor’s address and mine. The good news is that ever since Google Maps — the apparent go-to guide for special delivery drivers — has come along, special deliveries are wrongfully delivered to only the one wrong house.

That’s progress.

Unfortunately, other people like the window-repair guy from out of town and the call-before-you-dig locater guy have been all over the place for miles up and down the road trying to find our place because you can tell them you live at, say, mile marker 111.8 or 111 and eight-tenths or eight-tenths of a mile past mile marker 111, and it somehow doesn’t compute.

The GPS coordinates are a godsend.

I try, now, to tell the call-before-you-dig call center people who write up the work order the exact GPS coordinates of my driveway, and they write it down, but they don’t have rural roads, out-back-of-beyond training for the country-impaired city-dwellers. What they have is a requirement to fill out certain fields in their work order.

They take down my name, phone number and address, then ask where I need things marked and I start talking “north,” “east” and “300 yards south,” but they invariably ask something like “Where is this in relation to the front door?” And I don’t know how to answer because I live in the country and the front door isn’t the most-used door so the back door seems like the front door, so which one do they want?

“Uh, yes? The north side. Just write down ‘north side,” I say

The whole time, though, my dread is building because I know this question is coming: “What is the nearest side or intersecting street to the place to be marked?”

It’s the country, we have no nearby streets except the road that goes by my “front door,” I tell them — without saying that the word “by” means about a quarter mile away.

“Here, take my GPS coordinates,” I beg. And they take the numbers and repeat them back to me, but they keep asking the question about the nearby streets, expecting me to suddenly remember that I live on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 5,475th Street.

Doggedly determined to properly fill in their paperwork, they inevitably get onto some map program and ask skeptically about a couple streets they see. I have to explain that one of them is a mile and a half away one direction and the other is about four miles the opposite direction. This confuses city-dwellers and you can hear them trying to compute the miles into city blocks.

I end up telling them that my property is one of about a dozen (maybe 16) places with similar landmarks and outbuildings in that six-mile stretch between the “cross-streets” she has just typed into the work order, but those GPS coordinates are exactly where my driveway is located. It only takes about 30 minutes to convince the operator to tell the locater person to go directly to the GPS coordinates.

I’ll never get that time back, or repair the skin and hair damage which that much stress causes, but if we could just use those coordinates in the address to begin with, it will ease my remaining years before what will surely, now, be an early death of me.

——

It’s kind of like a treasure map, but with better hidden codes at [email protected].