That's Captain Anisha to You!

I have always thought I would make a good sailor. Not because of my fantastic vocabulary of cuss words, which gives me phrases like ‘daft brick’ when I most need it, but because I can sniff out the weather and thought this was a very sailor-like ability. But as it turns out, I forgot to take into account my abysmal sense of direction. As a sailor, I think my range of navigable area just got reduced to the baby pool (But sail the seas I will ye scurvy filth!).

You see, owing to my tendency to get lost in far away thoughts at the snap of a finger, I never really paid attention to where I was going. For the most part, in my head, directions from A to B are something like this:

I’m not making a case for women with a bad sense of direction. My mom is a navigational rock star with an almost photographic memory for directions. I on the other hand, only learn directions after repeatedly traversing routes and forcing myself to concentrate.

Last week, I ventured out with the car into an area that I wasn’t too familiar with. It had a lot of narrow roads and hardly any traffic signals, so I couldn’t stop anywhere and entice Google Maps to be my knight in shining armour (and entice it I have to, because the Google Maps on my phone can be a little uptight about being chivalrous).  What I resorted to, was what Douglas Adams calls Zen navigation – find a car that looks as if it knows where it’s going and follow it(“The results are often more surprising than successful, but it’s usually worth using for the sake of the few occasions when it is both”).  My logical reasoning also suggested that if many vehicles took a left turn and didn’t turn right or go straight, I could safely follow them. 

I ended up getting thoroughly and completely lost. 

I tried three different routes which all felt like they were the right ones but led me to some place I’d never been before. Finally after a lot of cursing (“Argh!”,”Graa!”, “Stupid one way!”) which would make any self-respecting sailor slap his forehead and declare me a lost cause, and a little help from Google Maps, I managed to get back to the place I started out from and find my way back home.

Anyway I don't know about you, but I still think I would make a good sailor.