500
The land before time
(thelemmy.club)
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/40088294
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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I was one of those people :/
Me too, but with office supplies instead of pizzas. They handed me a ripped out chunk of phone book, the "map" section at the back, and let me go. It was also in the liminal period where cellphones were ubiquitous enough that most payphones had been ripped out, but a cellphone was still too expensive for me to afford, so that was fun.
Recently I've been thinking back to when I'd roadtrip around, like 6-12 hour drives, to meet online friends. The MapQuest directions would be 2 or 3 pages long, but that wasn't manageable since I was driving, often at night. I'd write down the highways, and the miles I'd be on them and maybe the last 3 streets on a small piece of notepad paper and just hope for the best. No idea now how it ever worked. 😁
Yeah, signage used to be massively more important. Not just the intersection signs, but the mile markers, the signs that give you a general guide to a distant hospital or park, the signs on overhead bridges that tell you what that cross street is. You'd have to constantly note them.
The compass was a lot more important, to the point where people installed aftermarket compasses in their car if there wasn't one already. Also there was a lot more math with address numbers, like noting which side of the street had odd numbers, then counting how much they were incrementing to estimate how close you were. Resetting your "trip odometer" could be important.
There was just a lot more "dead reckoning" type of shit. GPS made all of this stuff so much easier. I do miss the AAA Triptiks though. My Grandma had AAA and she would get them for me. There was something really satisfying about working your way through one on a long road trip.
I remember my parents planning long journeys using some piece of software (AA branded I think) that would print out all your turns, intersections and distance between them (in the late 90s).
In the mid 00s when I needed to navigate myself, I would plan it out on a map (Melways crew rise up!) and write myself prompts on paper in big writing with arrows so I could glance at it while driving.
Basically exactly like modern sat nav but without the live traffic.
Yeah, my wife and I had a gift membership through AAA in the 90s, and they had point-to- point maps that they assembled in a book to plan out our trip for our honeymoon. It was like a paper version of GPS maps.
The dark ages! I'm not really sure how we survived but we did.
Well now you know what needs to be added to your resume
I also did this job as a student, with paper maps and all (after two months I memorised all streets around us) and yes it’s on my LinkedIn resume.
I meant use the phrase in the OP pic as the job title
Sure I would too, navigation is an impressive skill nowadays
Yeah. I’m THAT guy who says “no it’s THAT way” when someone explains something about some place and they do hand gestures in a completely wrong direction.
Thank you for your service o7
It was a greasy job but someone had to do it o7
How'd you do it?
I was actually one of the people on the phone taking the orders and making pizzas, it was really a nightmare trying to listen to what they wanted over whatever was going on in the background of both the restaurant and their homes, because people are always talking to other people in the background of what they want on their pizza so you're talking to like 3-4 different people each time, because no one thought of their order in advance. You had to listen carefully too because if you made a mistake on the arcane point of sale terminal then you're in trouble because it takes 1000 keystrokes to cancel out an order on those things. Then there were always people haggling over the total, or coupons, or have special delivery instructions. Really, online ordering is basically the best use of the internet :P