Bastard Multimap
Myself and my boss were due to attend a meeting in Croydon. Neither of us had ever been there before and had no idea where the building was so, deciding to avail myself of the infinite knowledge stored on the internet, I tapped a couple of postcodes into Multimap and we had our directions.

Sadly, neither of us are able to drive so we had to figure out the public transport route.

After getting a train into London, I met up with my boss and we boarded the train that was heading towards Croydon. After ten minutes, the train stopped. And sat there. Then, after a few minutes of silence, it sat there some more. Eventually, the driver announced that we were being delayed because of a fatality on the track several miles away which was backing up all the trains.

Eventually, the train wheezed, juddered and started to move. However, we had to get off a stop earlier then anticipated, then wait for another train to take us just that little further. We were at a Croydon station, but not the Croydon station we required.

The train arrived, we got on, travelled one stop and got off again. We walked outside, whereupon I removed a small map that I'd printed off from the magical internet and the lovely, lovely autoroute.

Thus began a walk which looked like about ten minutes on paper, but actually took us 45 minutes. It was also uphill. All of it. The day was unpleasantly warm and we both had suits on. After fifteen minutes, we had our jackets slung over our shoulders, and my hair was plastered to my head with perspiration.

Eventually, we arrived at an area which we thought was probably correct, although the actual road we required didn't seem to exist. After some careful checking, we realised that we'd walked too far and had to go back down the road half a mile. More checking of the map, mopping of the forehead, and general cursing ensued.

Finally, we found ourselves standing on the exact spot that the little arrow on the map was pointing to. It was an odd building and not what we were expecting. It looked more like a hospital than an office building. At that moment, a care assistant walked out of a door holding a man by the arm who was, shall we say, a little 'uncomplicated'. We appeared to be standing outside a care home for the mentally challenged.

I wanted to cry and, for the briefest moment, I saw the watery shimmer of tears in my boss's eyes. A taxi driver who was waiting to collect someone told us that we were miles from our destination and when I proffered the map so that he might tell us where we could find the building, he merely chortled and said, "It's not even on that map. That's how far away you are."

We walked back to the train station, sweaty, tired and developing a mutual hatred of each other. Ironically, this particular part of Croydon appeared to have been designed by MC Escher as we had walked from the station to the middle of nowhere and back to the station, and THE ENTIRE FUCKING JOURNEY HAD BEEN UPHILL.

We arrived back at the station. The next couple of trains were delayed. We phoned a taxi. When we got in and announced our destination, the taxi driver nodded in a non-committal way and drove us away. Five minutes into the journey he admitted that he had no idea where he was taking us...

We arrived, finally, at the meeting, 2 hours late. The people at the meeting hated us on sight because we were there to add more work to their already hectic schedules.

When we left the building, it transpired that the station we had got off at about an hour and a half previously was a 3-minute walk away.

We have never been back since. Fucking multimap.
(Ravenhill, Sat 9 Sep 2006, 22:56, Reply)