The guard who is the map

On the first week of term at a large campus in Giza, there is a map just inside the main gate. It is a good map. Every faculty is on it, every building is numbered, the paths are drawn to scale.

Almost nobody uses it. The new students walk straight past it to the guard in the booth and ask him where the engineering library is.

He does not know the building numbers. He says to go past the trees, keep the fountain on the left, and look for the stairs with the broken railing. It works every time.

The map is correct. It is just answering a question nobody is asking. A first-year student does not think in grid squares and numbered blocks. She thinks in what she can see from where she is standing. The guard speaks that language. The map speaks the language of whoever drew it.

This happens everywhere instructions live. The form that is legally complete and impossible to fill in. The leaflet in the box that lists every feature and never says which button to press first. The directions that make perfect sense to the person who already knows the way.

That last one is the hard part. The people who build a place, a product or a process know it so well that they can no longer see it as a stranger does. They could walk it with their eyes shut and still not explain it to anyone else.

Being right about the layout is the easy half. The other half is standing where the newcomer stands, and starting from there.