![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
car computers
Sep. 7th, 2012 01:12 pmMy parents gave me a GPS for (next) Christmas, and I've spent most of this week figuring out how it works.
I am, as you may have heard, very good at getting horribly lost while driving. Apparently, having a GPS doesn't fix this at all. I'm still just as horribly lost, but now I'm horribly lost in this weird way which involves knowing precisely where I am - and my lostness can best be seen in the fact that my GPS keeps re-calculating my route, triumphantly presenting a new one, and then, a few seconds* later, re-calculating yet again because I've just managed to go totally the wrong way again.
Really irritating having this fancy machine telling you precisely what you should be doing and somehow failing to follow its clear instructions.
* Not exaggerating. Every few seconds. Literally. I went into slightly the wrong street, got back into the new "right" street, drove fifteen metres, somehow ended up in the wrong lane, drove on the newly-calculated route for maybe five seconds, took the wrong turn...
In other GPS news:
The computer voice thinks that Waverley and Montague should be pronounced not as "WAY-ver-lee" and "MON-tag-yoo", but as "Wah-VER-lee" and "MON-tag". Weird.
It (helpfully) tells you the name of the road you're driving down. When, however, you're driving somewhere that isn't in its maps - like a carpark or driveway - it obviously doesn't know the name, so it starts saying "DRIVING ON ROAD". As opposed to driving on the footpath, or through a building, or in a river...
I am, as you may have heard, very good at getting horribly lost while driving. Apparently, having a GPS doesn't fix this at all. I'm still just as horribly lost, but now I'm horribly lost in this weird way which involves knowing precisely where I am - and my lostness can best be seen in the fact that my GPS keeps re-calculating my route, triumphantly presenting a new one, and then, a few seconds* later, re-calculating yet again because I've just managed to go totally the wrong way again.
Really irritating having this fancy machine telling you precisely what you should be doing and somehow failing to follow its clear instructions.
* Not exaggerating. Every few seconds. Literally. I went into slightly the wrong street, got back into the new "right" street, drove fifteen metres, somehow ended up in the wrong lane, drove on the newly-calculated route for maybe five seconds, took the wrong turn...
In other GPS news:
The computer voice thinks that Waverley and Montague should be pronounced not as "WAY-ver-lee" and "MON-tag-yoo", but as "Wah-VER-lee" and "MON-tag". Weird.
It (helpfully) tells you the name of the road you're driving down. When, however, you're driving somewhere that isn't in its maps - like a carpark or driveway - it obviously doesn't know the name, so it starts saying "DRIVING ON ROAD". As opposed to driving on the footpath, or through a building, or in a river...