A Look on the Lighter Side: Navigating modern world is not picnic

Judy Epstein

We were riding in a friend’s car when she tried to turn off her GPS.

It got snarky with her.

“Discontinue navigation?” it asked.

“Yes,” she said.

It pretended not to hear her.  “Discontinue navigation?” it asked again.

“Yes!” my friend shouted.  “Discontinue!”

I noticed that her car’s navigator used a different voice than ours — it was crankier, and a little passive-aggressive about being discontinued.

“If you wish to discontinue, say ‘Yes’,” it went on.

“Yes!  Yes!  I just said so!  Discontinue!”

“Discontinuing navigation,” it said.  It sounded sulky.

“Whew!” I finally commented.  “That’s worse than mine!  I didn’t think that was possible!”

“Could it be you just don’t know how ours works?”  That was my husband.  He was riding in the back, with me.

He thinks I don’t know how to work anything more complicated than a pencil sharpener.  He’s wrong, though — some of the pencil sharpeners don’t behave well, either.

The episode reminded me of a long-ago trip to visit my boys at camp. I was driving alone, with a  pre-programmed GPS, but something went wrong.

I had detoured around an accident, but nobody told the GPS; and from Long Island all the way to the Berkshires, it tried to get me back on course, telling me to “Take the next available U turn” at every single highway sign, dirt road and intersection.  It was like traveling with a psychotic parrot, except you couldn’t give it a cracker.

I had to shut it up, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road — this was deer country — so I buried it under my sweater.

Then my coat.  Then my purse and shoulder bag, too. After all that,  If you listened hard enough you could still hear its muffled voice.

When I finally pulled up at camp, the boys were happy to see me.

They gave no thought to the pile of things in the front passenger seat, concentrating instead on where to get ice cream.  But eventually they noticed.  “Mom,” one of them asked, “Why is your sweater saying ‘Take the next  U-turn’?”

“I don’t hear anything,” I insisted.

Now I have a smart phone, like everybody else.  You are always “on the map,” because it draws the map around you — you and your pulsing blue dot.  As that great sage, Buckaroo Banzai, might have said, “Wherever you go, there you are!”

But where, exactly, is that?

For example: My husband was driving us to Boston, and we were somewhere south of Hartford — I think — when I looked at my phone. I was surprised to notice that the phone thought we should get off the highway in 500 feet, for the turn-off to Boston.

“We have to get off NOW,” I said to my husband.

“That’s easy for you to say,” he replied, “but have you noticed, there isn’t any exit?”

“That’s ridiculous,” I answered.  “We’re right there! The phone says so!”

“Try zooming out,” he suggested.

Obediently, I zoomed out for better perspective, but it still looked like our turn-off was coming any second.

I widened some more. Finally, I spotted a useful landmark.  “Is there some kind of lake to the north of us?”  I asked.

“In the middle of Connecticut? I don’t think so.”

“Really big, and wide?” I said. “I can’t understand it.”

I was wrestling with the phone, at this point, trying desperately to make some sense of what I saw. “Why would Long Island Sound be to the north of us?”

My husband started laughing.  “This from the woman who said, on our honeymoon, that the sun was setting in the wrong place!”

“Well, it was!  It was setting in the east….or at least, it would have been, if our train had been heading south like I thought.”

“Love of my life, could you by any chance be holding your phone upside down?”

“No, because if I’m doing that, then Port Washington would be at the top of the … Oh.  Never mind.”

By now, my beloved was in danger of choking, he was laughing so hard.

“It’s not my fault!” I wailed.  “Why did it do that?”

“Oh, you’re just special, I guess.”

He’s just jealous because these things never happen to him.

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