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.
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