Past the old cinema

Ask someone in Alexandria where they live and you may be told to turn right after the old cinema, the one that closed before you were born.

It makes perfect sense to them. They have walked past that corner every day for thirty years. The cinema is still standing in their mind, sign and all.

The delivery rider has never seen it. He is circling the block with a bag of food going cold, looking for a building that exists only in someone else's memory.

Most of us give directions like this, and not only to riders. We write the instructions on the pack as if the reader already knows what we know. We set the price assuming the buyer earns what we earn. We explain the product to people we imagine are worried by the same things, want the same things, and have the same time, the same patience and the same phone.

They do not. The person on the other side is not a copy of us running a little behind. They started somewhere else, carry other worries, and are better at some things and worse at others in ways we cannot guess from our side of the counter.

This is why the most common piece of advice is also the least useful. If I were you, I would do this. But I am not you, and the advice is really about me.

The work is to find out where the other person is standing before telling them which way to turn.