Hello Guides! My name is Zach Miners. I just started working at Google as a Content Strategist, and I shared a blurb/short story about myself to my team as part of my introduction. My story involves Google Maps. Another Googler who used to be part of the Local Guides team suggested I post it here, so here it is. Hope you enjoy! Thank you for your work on Maps!
In the years between college graduation and my move to San Francisco in 2013 I still did not have a smartphone. My friends and I would take trips into Manhattan but not before visiting MapQuest on our desktops, looking up the address and literally hand-drawing our own crude maps on yellow notebook paper, because for some reason printing was not an option. We would pull these yellow scraps of paper out of our pockets when we got pitifully lost on, say, Houston Street on our way to Katz’s Delicatessen. I even still used my LG flip phone during the four years I worked as a reporter in Washington D.C. Then in January of 2013 I graduated with honors from the LG Chocolate to the iPhone 5 and finally started using Google Maps on mobile. No more physical ink and paper maps. Within a year I was covering Google I/O and writing features about gaps in Google Street View. A couple years later, while working as a content strategist at a multimedia company in Silicon Valley, I commuted via bike and in the early days I relied on Google Maps to provide me with the safest and least outrageous cycling route up to Nob Hill from Caltrain. But I still cherish some of those early hand-drawn maps that I’ve saved. They’ve become sentimental. Now, I’m thrilled to help add a little bit more magic, usefulness and that special customer “sentiment” into Google’s content.