Strangely, my roving reference interview didn’t take place until, (say this in a deep movie announcer voice) later that same day, (/movie announcer voice) as I was a couple miles from home. At a slightly odd intersection a semi-truck in front of me straddled the double yellow and stopped. No signals, and no safe way around on either side had me stopped a few yard back from him. (I didn’t want him to roll back into me.)
The driver hopped out of his rig, I assumed to check on a piece of equipment. Except that after he rounded the backend, he kept walking towards me. His body language indicated that he was confused and had a question, so I rolled down the window a bit. He asked, “Which way is North?” I pointed in the proper direction. But every instinct in my body said that this wasn’t his real question. So in good reference interview fashion I got him to tell me he wanted to go to Route 31 and his ultimate destination was Rochester and that he couldn’t use the Thruway. Which would have been the easiest, heck, we were less than 100 feet away from it.
So I gave him the best directions to get to 31. I described the way to get to route 31 and before I’d gotten him to his second turn he looked very confused, so I started over again, leaving out landmarks that I had thought would be useful the first time. “Turn left at this intersection that we’re at right now. at the next stop sign turn left again on
So that’s the story of my roving reference from my car. Which is really funny since I don’t have any indication on the car that I’m a librarian, just that I’m an Amerks fan.