You are here, it insists

Every concourse carries a few of them, spaced at intervals, each encased in a scratched acrylic box lit slightly dimmer than the surrounding signage, each presenting its findings without apology: a schematic corridor system, gates numbered in a sequence that makes sense only after the fact, restrooms marked by a symbol older than most of the terminal itself, and, at the center of it all, a dot. The dot claims a location. We have examined this claim at several airports and find it, for the record, accurate in the majority of cases, though you are here is a harder proposition to verify than it first appears, since travelers reading the map have often already moved several feet by the time they finish locating themselves on it. Votes among us on the map's overall utility were rarely unanimous. One position holds that the map succeeds simply by existing, a fixed point of certainty in a building designed to disorient; a second holds that most travelers bypass it entirely in favor of a phone, glancing at the acrylic box only when the phone has no signal, which in a terminal is often. Both positions were entered into the minutes. What we can report without dissent is that the map never updates itself, that gate changes render entire sections quietly false, and that someone, at every terminal examined, still stands in front of it, tracing a route with one finger before setting off in the correct direction anyway.

The Committee on Ordinary Objects