Don't Tell Me Where to Go - January, 2008

Many years ago, the late, great Sylvia Gordon (my dear mother) and I ventured out on the highway for a trek to Long Island for a family wedding. It was to be a long drive, but I was armed with directions and a co-pilot, Mom, who grasped them tightly in her hand. After the expensive repair and tow following a flat tire in Hillside, NJ, many miles from planned our overnight stay in a motel, at long last we landed on the Long Island Expressway. Our exit was about 100 numbers from our initial location, but somehow Mom felt it necessary to begin reading them off one by one. “OK,” she said, “here’s exit 17.” After about 10 references to exits, I couldn’t take it anymore and asked her to refrain from counting them off again until we got within the last five.

So is it any wonder why I resisted getting a GPS system?

Given the fact that I have a total lack of the Piscataway gene and have gotten lost every time I have had a Rutgers Cagers Club meeting at Charley Brown’s, despite using MapQuest for directions, it seemed a necessity to succumb to the wonders of modern technology. Who knew when John Glenn first orbited the earth that his pioneering work would eventually lead to the launch of satellites that can land me in Piscataway?

My impression of a GPS system was that it would be a little machine that would start calling out the exits far from the destination, a la Mom. Turns out that isn’t quite the case after all. Oh, she (AKA “Sally Garmin;” anyone who speaks to me that regularly has to have a name) gives me the countdown and distance, followed by what could be considered a “you’re coming up on it soon” warning, and then finishes up with the directive to turn, so that’s about three orders, far better than Mom’s counting the exits on the Long Island Expressway. So far so good.

I can’t help but notice that she sounds just a tad impatient when I get an order to turn but defer to the red light and wait. And worse, fail to follow the directive, and she gets downright testy, displaying an attitude and tone somewhere between disgust and disdain when I decide to follow another route. “Recalculating,” she virtually hisses at me as she rolls her virtual eyes and figures out how to get me back on track. I could swear I heard her mumble, “Recalculating, you idiot. Can’t you follow my simple directions? Sure, miss the turn and I’ll still have to get you out of this mess.” Once she sent me one way on the way there and dictated a different route for the return trip. I often do that, just to make the trip more interesting, but I wondered why Sally felt the need to show she had more than one trick up her sleeve.

When Sally speaks, she has a bit of an accent, somewhat affected and something akin to Martha Stewart, the native of Nutley, NJ, who intones the tone of tony Connecticut when she speaks. Or perhaps a better comparison is to Tina Turner, from Nutbush, Tennessee, who affects a European accent when she speaks. It is true that I don’t know from where Sally Garmin hails, but, babe, you’re in NJ, so try to fit in with us Jersey girls, will ya?

I have this vision of Sally and her cohorts firing themselves up at night and swapping stories via satellite about the stupidity of their owners. “Mine can’t tell his left from his right,” one would offer, while another would counter with, “You wouldn’t believe how far off course mine went today,” adding with a smirk, “again – in Piscataway.”