Reason #40359 that I love the New Yorker:

I don't know how long this article will remain available online, but here's a link to it as of this posting. It's about "The science of driving directions," and it's better than crack. An exerpt:

Navteq has about six hundred field researchers and offices in twenty-three countries. There are nine field researchers in the New York metropolitan area. One morning this fall, I went out with a pair of them, Chris Arcari and Shovie Singh. They picked me up on Forty-second Street, in a white S.U.V., after making that unextraordinary left off Broadway. “We’re going to be working over by LaGuardia Airport,” Arcari said. “One of the items we need to check out is some street names. They’ve put up new signs. Then we’ll proceed to an area that we have targeted.” Arcari, who is thirty-seven and was brought up on Long Island, was the senior member of the team, and he tended to speak in the formal, euphemistic manner of a police officer testifying in court. He’d been with Navteq for ten years. Singh, a native of Trinidad who grew up in Queens, was a new hire. He’d got hooked on geography after taking some classes in the subject in college.

GETTING THERE, by NICK PAUMGARTEN, Issue of 2006-04-24