Yesterday, partly out of curiosity, I took my mother’s Garmin GPS Navigation tool with me on a trip into the city. You have either heard, or experienced some of the interesting directions these things give.

I have had my share of weird directions. Once it had me drive around the block only to arrive back at my original place, then direct me to the entrance to something (I don’t remember what).  I am not sure why I followed it, but I did.  Maybe it was the authoritative voice tone.  Maybe it was me trying to show faith in something my siblings and I bought for my mother.

There are accounts, true or not, of people driving their cars into rivers because they followed the instructions of the machine even though there was obviously no bridge. I blame the drivers in these cases because they neither updated their maps regularly nor seemed to have any common sense.

As it is, the machine cannot pronounce many of the street names in Ontario. Yonge street is pronounced Yonj.  Living somewhat rural we have roads with names like St. John’s Sideroad–which the machines reads as SDRS.  I wonder what it would do if it had to pronounce Spadina or Strachan? (The pronunciation might surprise you.)

Luckily, besides humorous pronunciation, the machine performed well. As a result, I would call that Yesterday’s Perfect Moment.  It is nice when the machines that we allow to control our lives more and more function well.  It gives us the illusion that we are owning the electronic slave and not the other way around.

If you have a funny GPS/navigator story, I would love to read it.