Map DEAF Jam

It’s widely known that I am a GPS fan who uses high tech mapping devices daily to navigate from bed, bath and beyond. So even with a few flaws and some occasional misdirection worthy of a slide of hand magician, it takes a lot o’ poxes for those l’il black boxes to get on my Ox-cart’s bad side. But this week I had the (dis)pleasure of trying to navigate with a new-fangled voice-programmed satellite map instead of the old fashioned punchy numbers go-car-go show. 

  

No doubt it’s fun technology to be able to yell back at the GPS and finally force an inanimate robot screen to listen to me be mean after so many years of being ignored by the rest of my family. But the problem is the thing just glows and knows I can’t punish it for misinterpreting everything I say and seizing up unexpectedly anyway. Is it that my rust-bucket car is too noisy or is it my sloppy speech is so slurred that the command ‘Highway’ stops traffic and really sounds in a way like ‘Hives n’ Whey’?

  

At least when the alive members of my tribe ignore me or are coma-bound they try to LOOK moderately interested as they turn pale and their eyes glaze over easy to sound. The irritating dash-top roadie doesn’t worry if I’m in a hurry, it just drones and bleats, objections to my questions with constant repeats. Who pays hundreds of dollars to coax a stupid machine to berate and badger, when spouses will happily do that job for free but louder?

Though it’s true the blackend box made me blue, it DID eventually route me to where I needed to be, still witless, mapless, and no worse for the wear. I honestly think I can already do all that stuff too but better on my own, since I take up little more real estate while sitting on the dash and don’t need plugging in so long. I just hope when my gray matter gets even softer and my ear canals miss more calls 'bout boatloads of free eats for geezers, my friends and family will be as patient with me as I am with this deaf and dumb GPS with frequent seizures.