Why Women Can't Park Cars and Men Can't Read Maps

Monday February 19th

This morning we attempted the commute to Ella’s new nursery and onwards to the job I’ve been offered, which is on the north shore. I ended up driving the Honda while Darren did the navigating, which is a reversal of our usual roles.

As I mentioned previously, the drivers in Sydney are incredibly discourteous and the rules of the road for drivers and pedestrians are altogether different than in the UK. The rules for pedestrians include:-

1. Always walk out onto zebra crossings without stopping to check that it’s safe to do so
2. Walk out between moving cars in much the same fashion
3. Always saunter across zebra crossings and never acknowledge the driver who stopped to let you cross.

The rules for drivers appear to be:-

1. Under no circumstances must you allow anybody into your queue
2. It is your duty to weave between other cars to get to your destination more quickly
3. Honk your horn at people who appear lost.
4. When waiting in a queue at a petrol station, repeatedly sounding your horn might persuade the person in front to pay for their petrol more quickly

Being unfamiliar with the roads doesn’t help because you find yourself stuck in filter lanes turning the wrong way and when you put your indicator on to move over to where you need to be, absolutely nobody stops to let you out. The upshot of this is that you end up taking all sorts of wrong turns and having to pull over and read your map. The maps are very large scale so every few blocks you have to go to another page in the book. The final straw is the constant inability to turn right (and sometimes left) and the ridiculous number of traffic lights (27 sets on my potential journey to work, none of them letting more than five or six cars through at a time).

Of course, this doesn’t make up for bad navigating. The highlights of the morning included vague directions like “get yourself to Wattle Street”, commenting on side roads for the sake of it (without indicating whether I was required to turn down them) and telling me to turn “next left”, which led me directly onto a tramline rather than an actual road designed for cars. The tramline was the absolute last straw. I pulled over and turfed Darren out of the passenger seat saying “I’m not driving any further with you navigating, not ever”

“How come we never have this sort of difficulty when I’ve got the map?”
“Ok, don’t get shirty”
“But you have stressed me out! You drove me onto a tram line!”
“No, I just said “turn left”, it was you that drove onto the tram line”
“You can’t see that you have stressed me out?”
“I can see that you are wound up”

The manager at the university rang me in the afternoon to check how I’d got on with the dry run. I had to admit that my husband’s navigating was lacking and had left us hopelessly lost. As somebody who is rarely late and rarely lost, it was excruciating to admit this. I muttered something about him being unable to read a map. “We all have our strengths”, she replied, which I thought was gracious in the circumstances.