User:PhantomSoul

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Hello There! (About Me)

My name is George, and I hail from Union, New Jersey - that's right, land of Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Taylor Ham, and the Shore. For those of you who are a bit challenged in the geography of the Garden State, Union is right outside of Newark, to the southwest a few miles. To pay the bills, I'm a business software developer for a leading specialty food importer in New York. In my spare time, you can find me working outside in the garden, hiking and/or camping in the NY/NJ/PA area, watching TV, and of course Wazing around the local area here and online.

I came to Waze in the fall of 2012 after Apple had decided to do away with Google-provided maps on its iOS mobile platform, leaving its own iOS navigation product, along with the Motion X GPS Drive product I was using up until then, grossly deficient and pretty much unusable to get anywhere, even if you somewhat knew the way. So, I began on a frantic search to find a new navigation product and after trying a bunch of things, I came across Waze. It was definitely an unconventional product, with its almost-cartoonish graphics and presenting the driving experience as a social game to contribute to the overall driving experience. Best of all, it was free, and I was intrigued.

I've always had an (some people would say) unnatural obsession with roads, and how to get places, the best way to go, etc., etc., way before I could even drive. As a kid and teen, I'd frequently get laughed at by friends and others by knowing the way better than our parents, or whoever was driving. I never really let it get to me, and, in fact, I would simply own it more often than not, to the point where I would often get turned to for direction. Naturally, when I saw that I could fix my own issues with the map, I didn't even hesitate to sign up.

Back in the Fall of 2012, the local map in central NJ, where I lived at the time, was pretty weak. It was difficult to get many places that didn't involve taking state or federal routes, despite the vast availability of perfectly good, though more local direct roads. I started optimizing that based on my own experiences, first in my own neighborhoods and around the places I frequented, and eventually throughout the county as an Area Manager. I would add county by county, updating road types to make the map more functional with non-freeway roads, and ultimately became Waze's first State Manager. In the Spring of 2014, we decided to adopt FC to settle the road type debate once and for all, and I played an instrumental role, along with mentoring many of the now-senior editors in the area, in updating NJ road types to FC, even taking that role up into the Hudson Valley region of New York when NJ was completed. More recently, I've taken up helping with local speed limits, gathering information about URs in NJ counties that most seem to need help, and helping other editors with complex navigation, particularly where atypical techniques may be needed. In between, I also continue to work out how to best sort out city-naming, which can get complex in the northeastern states, where large areas of many townships often colloquially go by some other unincorporated name, for example.

In any case, if any of these things sound intriguing to you, please feel free to say hi and let's talk. In the meantime, Happy Wazing, and see you on the map!