As I have mentioned in an earlier blog, I work at a roadside assistance dispatch center. As such, I deal on a daily basis with approximately 60 customers, each of which need some form of roadside assistance, of which 25% are at home, 20% are in parking lots of businesses, 50% are on major highways, and 5% are in the middle of nowhere. Now, the 25% who are at home are easy to deal with. We usually have their address on file, and just need to send someone out to unlock the vehicle, provide a jump start, or change the tire. Piece of cake. Those in business parking lots are easy to find, especially Walmarts, Walgreens, Safeways, Costcos, etc. Oddly enough, those who are in the middle of nowhere aren't NEARLY as hard to find as those on MAJOR HIGHWAYS. By hard to find, I'm speaking of the process in which we verify the location of their vehicle. Contrary to popular belief, we are not yet equipped to pull their location off of their GPS-enabled device, we use an older (And somewhat more reliable) method of verifying by address or crossing streets. When it comes to a Highway, it should be VERY easy: we just find out which exits they're between (Somewhere between exits 46 & 48 on I-75 North, for example). What is SO surprising is the fact that most people on highways have NO CLUE what the last exit they passed was, what the next exit is, or, often enough, what CITY they're in. A location-verification that should take literally five seconds turns into twenty minutes of asking "do you remember seeing any landmarks, mile markers, exit numbers, streets, businesses, etc. nearby?" and posing those questions in hundreds of different ways until finally something registers in their mind that helps specify their location. And the saddest part of all is the fact that most customers travel the same stretch of highway every single day, and on the day they break down have no idea where they're at. The stupidity of the average American commuter scares me.