While outside during a break, I see a man ask a woman how to get to the nearest bus stop. She tells him; however, OHSU has a weird up-and-down-and-all-around kind of campus and it's very easy to get lost, so I come forward and say I could show the man where to go. He follows me to a vantage point (the covered bridge between the main OHSU building and the OPC building where I work), I point to the bus stop, and he seems...um, vaguely interested. He then looks the other way towards the former bus stop, the one that's been swallowed by new building construction, and says, "That's not it?" "Um. No," I say.
Worrying he'll go the wrong way, I volunteer to walk him to the bus stop, and he follows. "Ah," he says as we pass a cafeteria, "their cafeteria's open." I say, "Good, you have a landmark," knowing that saying too much might confuse the guy. (That's a bad habit of mine, confusing people with Too Much Information.)
...I should have suspected trouble when he said, "So, you're showing me to the elevator?"...
So then we reach the doors outside, and we cross a small entry plaza, and I point out the canopies covering the bus stop, and he points out the TriMet bus sign -- "Oh, the 65 goes here" -- but then
he
keeps
on
walking
right past the stop, leaving me behind. I think that maybe, maybe, he's going to where the schedules are printed, but no, he walks right past that, and keeps going.
My last sight of him: he's looking around. Looking lost. People mill around him, knowing where they're going.
To quote Oingo Boingo, This has happened before, this has happened before...
For the second time, I've tried to do a nice thing for people new to this campus, by showing them where to go, to (apparently) no avail. And both times, the people were vague about what they needed, or what they needed seemed to change. For the second time, I tried to be helpful, but maybe (maybe) (mmmmmmmmmmmmaybe) they needed a kind of help I can't give.
So. Odd.
I hope he's okay.