[pesoneto]

After I posted this, I checked the definition of grok to make sure of my usage. Grok is a word invented by Robert Heinlein to describe the experience of a person moving from Mars to Earth and the subtle cultural shocks experienced. This word fits this situation exactly.

I was born in California and moved to Utah as an adult. The addressing system was incomprehensible at first. In Los Angeles when I was young, my father, a salesman, kept several huge map books in his car. The usage of these was first to look up a street name in an index section and then go to the correct page in the book. Then hunt for the street in the square specified in the index.

There were no such books in Utah. The geography is desert and mostly flat. The Cartesian system mostly works. There are some exceptions particularly as you get close to the mountains. In these cases, one would have to do the California thing. The map you would need used to be in the phone book. So typically you would hunt first for a phone booth.

But this was a long time ago. There are no phone books anymore. And certainly no phone booths. So this is a cultural shift in multiple dimensions.

Salt Lake City is a royal mess. What started out like LA with separate cities have now merged into a contiguous urban area. The origin in cases like this is the county center. So sometimes you can reference the original city coordinates or go with the newer unified system.

But still there is this disconnect in the ways that people think about street addresses. There are deep thought patterns that depend on where you were born.