In the land of the blind

One evening at the recent user interface conference in St. Andrews I was walking to a restaurant with some colleagues. Since I didn’t have a SmartPhone, I had studied a paper map beforehand, so I’d know where the restaurant was. We first took a detour to one colleague’s hotel so he could drop off his computer bag, and then we started toward the restaurant. At the second intersection my two colleagues both seemed to become disoriented.

“I’m not sure if it’s this way or that way,” one of them said.

“It’s half a block this way,” I replied, “on the right.”

Neither of them was satisfied with this answer. One colleague took out his SmartPhone and started to navigate an on-line map, while the other waited anxiously for the results.

“Really,” I said, “it’s just over there, half a block from here on the right, a little before the intersection.”

Finally, after a bit of a wait, the colleague who’d been fiddling with his SmartPhone looked up. “We need to go a little this way, on the right.”

Exactly where I’d said it was.

And that’s when I realized that not having a SmartPhone had given me a sort of super power — the same super power nearly all humans have had until very recently.

As the old saying goes: In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.