I feel like the grandfather telling about his mile long walk to school in the snow.

Waze has come a long way. When I first started, waze had automatic routines to adjust turn restrictions, road direction and road geometry based on user drives. So roads would seemly spontaneously move and change direction. Most roads wouldn't route and if they did, waze would do things like have you turn left off of bridges on the interstate to the road below (which is why reporting missing overpasses was so important back then). I would drive somewhere, get edit rights for the route, and clean up the route I drove. Then it was most satisfying to see the route used after the next tile update (which sometimes took a month).

There were no road locks, so you could edit anything in your editable area. But AMs needed to approve deletions, which didn't protect much as you could move segments, connect them together, delete all the nodes and shrink them down to next to nothing.

It was awhile before there were really any other editors working on any roads that I drove. You really needed the community to help understand how waze worked, but you could essentially do your own thing it your own area (which is why some of you may have seen all kinds of odd city names in Anne Arundel county, MD as I didn't know any better and just used the community name from the list of county maintained roads).

As for AM status, standards were a bit looser then as you can see in the response to my first post.

There have been quite a few editors that have come and gone in Maryland since I started. Its always disappointing to see an editor that you know has made your commute better disappear into the ether. On flip side its great to see how the local editing community has grown and become so dynamic.

Damn, wish I hadn't missed this earlier. Come on folks, some of you have some memories!

• I remember when I started using the app. I heard about the app on the radio and I was soon using it regularly for my commute. My old TomTom has not been plugged in since.
• I remember when I started editing and the PM I got welcoming me to editing. While Jason did not say so in so many words, I was doing it all wrong and needed help not being a noob. I just came across a circle in a parking lot yesterday that I deleted because it was one of those noob things I did.
• I remember a day when editing without scripts was normal, at least for me. When I started using scripts, I do not think there was a TamperMonkey/GreaseMonkey but that may have been my ignorance. Toolbox and Validator were the ones I remember starting with. Now, I have to hold my horses to keep from telling new editors about the help we having with scripts. What a daunting environment we have for a new editor to take in.
• I remember meeting my first SM when he pointed out that we don't map every alley in DC. That didn't seem logical to me but I remember spending the next couple days unmapping all of my alleys.
• I remember meeting my first CM too. I noticed a circle in DC that was broken and it was locked so I couldn't fix it. That same SM and the CM spent quite a while straightening it out "before the tile update." I didn't really understand what that meant at the time but it was interesting to watch them work. We didn't have GHO then so everything was visible for the whole country.
• I remember Tom helping me with place locks all the time. My last PM to him still sits in my outbox. For someone that seemed to like overlocking, it sure seemed like he did not mind unlocking. I still look at some of his locks, now years later and wonder what caused him to think *that* segment or place needed to be overlocked.
• I remember my first raid (first of a long series) in LA. By the time I left LA, I had met a whole bunch of senior editors, that convinced me that the Waze community was definitely something worth putting time into. LA changed many of my outlooks on editing. I figured out that the numbers did not matter anymore. Even my level didn't matter. If the edit was not going to improve something, why bother. I also became very interested in places out there when an R5 locked everything at R3 and I was a lowly R2. I remember complaining bitterly about incomplete places being locked and had people unlocking stuff for days because it made sense to me. China just furthered that. We had no "legal" source of truth and I ended up giving up on the raid because I wanted the stuff I entered to be right, not just close.
• I remember editing my first script when I went into a raid in Canada. I hated that the script colored the area I was working in, making it harder to see those things I wanted to work on. Yeah, all I did was comment out that one line coloring MY section of the raid but it sure made those other areas obvious if I wandered out.
• I remember trying to figure out how to submit for my first AM and how the hell do I generate a PL of the area I wanted. It didn't occur to me at the time how many places in that area needed and since, I bet I've touched as many places in Anne Arundel Co as anyone else. I also remember my "sample area" for my 2nd AM submission. I showed it to a newer editor the other day when I was trying to get him lined up to submit his first AM application.
• I remember leaving work last spring after a stressful day and driving over an hour out of my way to go down into Southern Maryland. My area down there has long expired but in those days, there was not any editors down there so that was how I got things done and found new edits to make. Surprisingly, I do not have any problems finding something to edit these days. There always seems to be plenty of things to do in the same old first AM area I requested.
• Last and definitely not least, I remember when SLs became a focus. I remember that SM above, finished everything in DC and I was green with envy because I could not finish Anne Arundel Co before he was done the whole district. SLs are one of the last features of that TomTom that I missed. The only difference was that the TomTom only did really major roads and Waze would do everything. The last thing that old TomTom did that I really do miss is lane guidance. I hope lane guidance comes before I am done editing, gone and forgotten.