Proceed to highlighted route. Then route guidance will start.
I roll my eyes. If I knew how to get to the highlighted route, I likely wouldn’t need any guidance. Once I’m on the main road ““ any main road ““ I can pretty much take it from there. My problem is getting to that point.
If I stand on the running board of our car, I can see where I want to be. It’s a place where cars move freely and fastly. What I can’t see is how to get from here to there.
As it turns out, neither can my GPS. Neither of them.
The GPS living in the dashboard of our car and the one living in my phone have different voices and different accents, but they have this in common: They don’t do parking lots.
That’s OK. We all have our limitations — things we can’t do — as well as our limits — things we choose not to do. But why is it OK that a device designed and sold specifically for navigation purposes gets to throw up its virtual hands when faced with an everyday navigation situation, like escaping from a parking lot?
Proceed to highlighted route. Then route guidance will start.
No, this won’t do. And I’ll register a complaint with the manufacturer, or maybe start a social-media protest campaign, just as soon as I get home. First, of course, I have to find that dagnabbed highlighted route.
Isabel – when presented with the problem of my GPS not recognizing a parking lot I just head out any exit and eventually my GPS will say, “You are going in the wrong direction idiot, make a U-turn” or something similar.
John – I’m with you, assuming I can find my way out of the parking lot. Some of these complexes are complex enough that I could drive around for a long while before hitting a true exit.
Funny thing. I recently asked my GPS to find a place called Perrytown, which was, as far as I knew on the edge of Port Hope, Ontario, and where I was when I asked. The GPS just looked at me as if I were talking in some unknown tongue. I drove around a bit on the streets of Port Hope, trying to figure it all out, and eventually saw a couple in a pickup truck stopped and talking with a man at the end of his driveway. I stopped and asked if they could tell me how to get to Perrytown. They said, “Follow us, we’ll take you there.”
So I followed them. For what seemed like forever but was, in reality, only 9 miles. Eventually we came to a sign “Perrytown.” There’s nothing there except a century old Anglican church. The pickup turned into the church parking lot. I followed suit. We stopped with our car windows opposite one another. The woman in the pickup truck said, “I suppose you thought we were luring you out somewhere to murder you.” I replied, “I thought we were maybe doing a remake of Deliverance.” The woman laughed and said, “The difference is that I still have all my teeth!”
Now, had I looked up Perrytown on my Maps app on my iPhone it knew where it was, so was more reliable than the GPS. However, I wouldn’t have had that delightful experience. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have to ask a human being for directions once in a while!
Tom
Tom – For sure, especially if you come out of it alive! I’ve had two similar “follow us” experiences in St. John’s (maybe Canada’s easiest city to get lost in), and you do meet the nicest people.
I am not a fan of using GPS. My dad was a navigator during WW2 and taught me from an early age how to read a map. It’s what I still do, mostly, although on the rare occasion when I use a GPS in a rental car, the most frequent comment I hear is “recalculating”
Alison – I didn’t know harry was a navigator. Never thought to ask, I guess. I used to use a paper map and now wonder how the heck I did it! Use it, or lose it . . .
Maps are one of my joys in life. I can sit entranced with an atlas or a roadmap, imagining all the places I could go, all the things I could see, all the things I could learn. The best thing about the GPS in my car is that I have learned how to turn it off.
Jim T
Jim T – As someone who once navigated us to a rail line, I don’t share your love of maps, or Alison’s. A bit slow at things visual, perhaps . . .