Diary of a 21st Century nobody - Get lost? No chance!

lost cartoon

'Hubby' has a marvellous sense of direction. Hubby can be lost and find, with ease, the direction he should be going in in order to get on the right path again. Hubby is amazing with directions whether on foot or in a vehicle. I,'tho, am not! However, I can read a map and navigate by that means. So, in the car we have several detailed road maps, and the wonderful pathfinder that is my husband!

Why, then, did he feel the need to have a satellite navigation system in the car? Well, it's progress I suppose, and the days of the road map could be numbered. So I bought him one - an all-talking, all-dancing 'sat nav' for the car. I knew he would enjoy reading all about how it worked, so I left him to it.

And he loved it! He used it regularly; so regularly that our beloved and well-thumbed road map was relegated to the car boot!

We used the sat nav when we journeyed to Scotland for a holiday, and it's very clever. The soothing tones telling us to turn left or right, even re-adjusting the journey when we took a diversion from the route to stop for dinner. Wonderful!

As we approached our destination a lovely little chequered flag popped up on the screen to indicate how close we were to the end of our 5 hour journey. At this stage, I just need to let you know that Hubby was so comfortable with this new gadget that he had left our road map in the garage, bless it, so confident was he that this sat nav could get us anywhere!

compass points
sat nav warning

I glanced out of the car window at the passing villages and signposts as the end of journey approached, and asked "Do you recognise any of these place names from our planned route?" The only reply came from the sat nav, which informed us in soft tones that we had "reached your destination on the left"..... Not unless we were expecting to camp in a dense pine forest we hadn't!! There were no street lights, house lights or signs of any life except the wildlife.

We stopped, in the pitch black, on a deserted road alongside a forest at 8pm on a cold winter's night....and then the awful words were spoken "Well," uttered hubby "this is wrong. I think we are lost." Aha, thought I ,he will now use his amazing directional powers to put things right... WRONG!

He had relied so entirely on the sat nav that he paid no attention to the direction in which we were travelling and had no idea at which point it had led us astray. I checked the post code for our destination, but he then told me that, for a change, he had input co-ordinates of longitude and latitude ..... We had no road map, and so were unable to find our way by place names. So, we checked the co-ordinates to ensure they were correct - much to Hubby's dismay, as how could he fail to input the correct ones?? The first one is fine, but the second one- according to the details from the hotel - is way off!! Of course, Hubby cannot understand why, but all I have to say is "you input them into the machine, so how could they have changed?"

That, then, is how we discover that we are 129 miles out on our co-ordinates and, because of a mountain standing between where we are and where we should be, we have no short-cut!!

o s map

 

The moral of the story is this - however clever the technology, there's no guarantee of the competence of the idiot pushing the buttons!!! Suffice to say, the road map is now back in pride of place, in the car, and nobody is going to allow Hubby to remove it!

 

 

Comments

If you have registered on the site you can login to view 0 comment(s) on this page.

Post Comment

If you have registered on the site you can login to post a comment on this page.


Website design by ReZolve. An SSIDM website - v2.9.010d [2]. Loaded in 0.0625 seconds.