cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/40088294
I was one of those people :/
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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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.
You missed a step: address block numbers on street signs!
If you look closely, they often read
STREET NAME ST
800,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,900
Although not all cities have them
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
They also got into a ton of car accidents in order to make that "30 minutes or less" promise. I can understand why that didn't last for very long.
that didn’t last for very long.
It started in 1979 and ended in 1993.
Mum was moaning about this last night reminiscing about the good old days when the act of writing actually involved writing instead of whatever the kids duct taping emotes, memes & comic sans to some predictive text via a spellcheck on the socials for points clusterfuck is going on these days.
A friend had had the gall to send a birthday card that had rather clearly been ordered online and shat out of a production line with fake handwriting...the ultimate insult.
I couldn't believe that was a service that actually existed when I first got one.
Like, as if buying a greeting card weren't already the bare minimum someone could do, let's find a way to put even less care and effort into it.
I generally dislike greeting cards. My wife and I have decided not to exchange them anymore (birthdays/valentines/anniversary). Her brother and sister have a cool tradition though, they get each other the wrong greeting card for each other's birthday. Last year my SIL got a bris card, and my BIL got a quinceñara card.
that sounds fun
My wife and I have been having our kids just make cards for occasions, sometimes recycling parts from old cards, but mostly just don't do any cards anymore.
My birthday was just over a week ago. My mother sent a hand written note, in cursive. It took a good 30 seconds to remember how to read cursive...
I'm reading a 3 A4 pages from my 12yr old at the moment, the mid point of his current post-apocalyptic world building wants feedback.
It's 95%+ early years test compliant script, but cool to see the words come alive on occasion and become art that goes beyond what fonts can manage.
UTF-8 O not really a drop in replacement for the Ensō
There was an entire video game about this guy!
Multiple.
Bring back the Noid! Fuck the crazy dude who made him "go away".
The world needs the Noid.
and everyone had porn staches, yes even your grandma.
excuse me, my grandma had a zz top beard. she still does, just thanks mitch.
Did she also have a jc penny catalog?
I was a mystical land pirate! But for a different sovereign.
Go on…
Probably "The Hut," but I'm speculating.
There were so many other pizza delivery services, way back when.
I would have that job. I am geographically challenged. Take me 5 min away from where I live and if it's a different route than normal, I will struggle finding my way.
I did this in 2016, used a combo of paper maps and GPS for the first few weeks until I was very familiar with the layout of our delivery area. The addresses used a logical structure if you know where the roads are, so after that point I'd just think about it for a second and know just where to go.
When I worked for Royal Maii the logical structure of delivery was governed by how a postman could end the round at the precise moment the off-licence opened.
I remember having to give your "cross streets," i.e. the nearest intersection of major thoroughfares, so they'd know which section of the Thomas Guide to look in, especially if there were multiple streets with the same name. Then again, I'm older than Domino's.
“Address and nearest cross street” Map of the area on a large poster on the walk-in door. That was all of the information at our disposal.
That photo has to be more than 450 million seconds into the current epoch. Hardly before time
It look slike it may have been made before the start of the unix epoch.
Doubt it, maybe a decade after the start of the Unix epoch
Surely you learn an area pretty quickly. Worst case you may ask what major road something is near and you would know that and then can quickly look at the map to find the small road. Like I say my street name and if someone asks where about is that I give them the name of the major road next to it.