Author:
Buggage
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Date Posted: 02:23:03 10/26/14 Sun
I run a towing company here in the Shenandoah Valley of Va. About once every two weeks or so, I get a call from someone, usually driving a big truck, who has managed to blindly follow their GPS and get stuck onone of our goat paths. The all time best one was last year, when I ended up winching a trailer (loaded of course) off an embankment, and then backing the truck & trailer out, about 2 miles to the hard surfaced road. I love folks who blindly follow the GPS, it's as if they turn the box on, and turn their brain off.
>Another column picked up from the paper. I've
>touched it up to de-emphasize the local angle a
>little, but other than that it's absolutely true.
>
>-- Wes
>
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>
>Someone recently gave my wife a GPS system. She’s used
>it a little, but I haven’t very much, since I rarely
>drive anywhere these days when I don’t know where I’m
>going because I’ve been there before. Oh, once in a
>while I will go to a race track I’ve never been to
>before and I have to glance at a map, but that’s
>pretty rare.
>
>The other day I had to drive her car up to a town I'll
>call Flatburg. I was by myself, so I thought I’d give
>the GPS a fair trial. Now, I know how to get to
>Flatburg. I’ve known it for fifty years or more, so it
>wasn’t as if I really needed the help. To get to
>Flatburg, you drive north up the highway until you get
>to the interstate, go west, and wait until you get to
>the sign that says “Flatburg.” Very simple. Even a
>child could do it. Right.
>
>I managed to get the thing turned on somewhere north
>of town on the highway. That’s something I don’t
>recommend trying to do while you’re driving by
>yourself, by the way. Almost as soon as I had it on, a
>girl’s voice told me to turn right on a small dirt
>road.
>
>“You’re crazy,” I yelled at the stupid machine. “Why
>would I want to go down a dirt road a mile out of the
>way when where I’m going is right ahead of me on the
>highway?”
>
>So, I ignored it. After I passed the dirt road, in a
>rather snotty voice the machine said, “Recalculating,”
>but in a tone I took to mean, “Why didn’t you listen
>to me the first time, stupid?”
>
>In the next five miles or so it managed to keep from
>sending me down every cross road I passed, but after
>that it didn’t get a thing right. Not once. I would
>have shut the stupid thing off, except I sort of
>wanted to see just how bad it was going to be. The
>answer was “not merely bad, but downright awful.”
>
>The dumb machine tried to send me off course at every
>intersection we came to. Every one! Once it tried to
>send me down a road that was abandoned when I was a
>kid. You might have been able to get down it in a Jeep
>with four-wheel drive and a chainsaw. Another time it
>tried to get me off at an intersection that never
>existed with a road that didn’t cross.
>
>By now, I was laughing at every wrong intersection,
>sometimes shouting things like “You @#$%^&* idiot!” at
>the machine. (Yes, I talk to machines. I’ve always
>done it. Get over it.)
>
>It did get the exit from the interstate at Flatburg
>correct -- but only because the dumb machine had been
>trying to get me off the interstate at every
>intersection from the highway onward. That counts as a
>“little boy who cried wolf” problem. Even that didn’t
>count, since as soon as I was on the side road, it
>tried to get me to go back east on the interstate.
>
>It did miss trying to send me down a few wrong side
>streets once I was in Flatburg, but only a few. I
>finally hit a point at an intersection where my
>destination was clearly in sight in the block to the
>left. You guessed it: it sent me to the right.
>
>Now, my son-in-law has pointed out that the machine
>may have inadvertently been set to the wrong
>destination. I don’t think so; I had it set for a
>destination that was already on the machine and there
>weren’t a lot of choices.
>
>I will say the machine was pretty good about telling
>me where I was. Telling me how to get where I wanted
>to go, it was abysmally, hysterically wrong. So, I
>learned something from that: don’t trust GPS
>directions. I mean, I knew where I was going, so I
>knew it was wrong. But what if I didn’t know where I
>was going?
>
>I may be old-fashioned and cantankerous, but I think
>I’ll stick with paper maps, thank you.
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