Didn't Have Twenty Floors

I cannot copy text from Dianping pages.  Chinese friends and sometimes foreign friends send me addresses in Dianping, I open and cannot copy the textual address to paste in a ride sharing service like Di Di.  This morning I got frustrated trying to do so and then figured I could probably just guess at the characters.  I recognized the first three.  And as hoped, it auto- populated the rest and I hit enter. 

It took forever for a driver to respond to my ride request.  Shanghai can be much harder to summon a Di Di.  I requested the ride, back on the forty-fourth floor.  I checked out, boarded the elevator, cut across the Meridien Lobby to the other elevator and rode it down to ground floor.  The app was still searching for a driver. 

I was resigned to go old-school and battle the street traffic for the next cab I could find when my phone started to ring and it was a Di Di driver who’d accepted the ride and was calling me to coordinate a pick up.  I was on the north side of JiuJiang Road.  “I’m at the hotel.”  “Hmm.  So am I.  Where precisely?”  We went back and forth like this till I was just about to get frustrated when the license plate I was looking forward pulled over ahead of me.  

And, as usually happens, once he is a person in the flesh and not a car icon plodding along a map, he proved to be a likeable chap.  “Do you think we can make it by 9:30AM?”  “Sure.  We have time.”’ Great answer.  And me, I talked on the phone did some emails, messaged folks to say I was almost there, when we arrived at a building that didn’t have twenty floors.  "Uh, sir . . . " I showed him the Dianping advertisement.  “No.  We’re at the wrong place.  That’s back by your hotel."

Turns out I’d typed in the right characters: 'Long Zhi Meng.'  But it’s a mall-chain and Shanghai has five or six Long Zhi Meng buildings.  I assured him it certainly wasn’t his fault.  But could he please drive as fast as he could now back to where we should be, back from where we started? 

Thursday 9/20/18