Earlier this year I gave Firegazer a GPS for his birthday. An inspired choice which has provided me with hours of entertainment.
It's a little like having a bossy aunt in the front seat telling you to turn left, right or to take the second exit from the roundabout. Occasionally you feel like throttling the bossy aunt as she calmly tells you to 'keep left...then take the right exit'. And yet, like a bossy aunt, it has more lifelong knowledge than you and knows that by taking one exit of the freeway further than you think you should will actually get you to the Homebush carpark faster; and when you misunderstand her instructions she calmly asks you to perform a u-turn or recalculates to get you back on track.
But is she better than the Sydney UBD (paper directory)? With the UBD I spend five minutes plotting my journey taking note of landmarks on the way. I know that the road I want is the third left after the traffic lights and that if I go past the swimming pool I've gone too far. By the time I reach my destination I have committed the whole journey to memory. I could retrace my steps, and I could go there again. With the GPS I am so busy being told by the bossy aunt to keep left, turn right and keep going straight that I don't look out for the little details that help me memorise the route.
Something tells me the UBD might be better for me but I'm too scared to break it to the GPS, I'm scared she might tell me off.
10 comments:
Ha! I have a bossy GPS too. She is too youndg to be my aunt, perhaps she could be my sister or a well educated (in traffic) colleague. Either way, since I always think I know better than her anyway, she spends a lot of time saying "recalculating", in such a way that it cracks my family up. If one of us does something the wrong way, makes an error in homework or a task, we all chime "recalculating". My UBD is now out of date, so navigating the newer 'burbs would see me recalculating my desire to even go there.
OK, so my comment turned into a post. Sorry about that.
I'd like to see a version of Hamlet where that was indeed the question...I'm sure it would make for a very interesting tour of the rotten state of Denmark.
In the GPS version of Hamlet, Rozencrantz & Guildenstern may merely get lost, not die.
Hmm, the UBD system only works if you are capable of memorising the instructions. By the third turn-off I've got no idea and a shameful sense of direction won't help me at this point. So I'd be GPS-ing it if I could.
I do love my GPS - a soothing English accented voice calmly telling me what to do next.
Pre GPS I did exactly the same as you with the UBD - I would absolutely know the route off by heart once I had plotted it ...
I still have vivid memories of a taxi ride from hell where the GPS guided driver insisted I was at my destination ( Cabrini) as the GPS had advised we were on Wattletree Road!
I think you should just use the GPS and save your memory for important stuff - like where you leave your keys.
I think if I had a choice I would have the GPS with the option of ignoring it when I thought I knew better but knowing it could fix my mess if I stuffed up. Although in Canberra you don't really need one as it is so easy to get around here.
Gulp — don't you, like, have mapquest.com in Australia? OMG! What'll I do?
You type in where your journey starts and ends, click, and there's your route, on a map, with step by step instructions you can print out and keep.
Hate those GPS things. UBD's better. But mapquest totally rocks. Awesome.
Heh. Where we live, there are two approaches to our house. The sensible one is to drive a long way along a main road, then turn off the main road into our street and proceed to our house.
The other way is a steep, narrow, four wheel drive only dirt road, that is marked on the [paper] map with a dotted line and warnings like NO ACCESS and STEEP, NARROW and LOCAL FOUR WHEEL DRIVES ONLY, etc. Apparently if you have GPS it tells you the quickest way to a destination. We can always tell which of our visitors have GPS as they arrive totally wild eyed and petrified. We greet them casually with 'So, you came the back way, eh?'
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