Tuesday, June 27, 2006

BAD NEWS, I CAN FIND YOU NOW!

Oh, the marvels of modern technology, and the gifts of the NASA programs and satellites. For Father’s Day from my son Anthony and the Little Woman I got a GPS. Those of you who do not know what a GPS is, it stands for Global Positioning System. You mount it in your car and it takes over the driving for you, finding anyplace in the world you need to go. No, it doesn’t steer for you or even accelerate and brake, but it does give you the estimated time of arrival, count down in miles, name of next street, arrows pointing on maps, and yes, it even talks to you!

I seems that with a cell phone, remote key locks that locate your car in the crowded parking lots, and now the GPS, there is very little to do except think about buying a CB radio.

The GPS opens up all kinds of possibilities for me. First of all, I can now get lost with confidence. My sense of direction left me in the womb. I always relied on the Little Woman to navigate for me, to get me anywhere I needed to go, including daily instructions on how to get to work. Now the Little Woman can follow the map for me and comment, “gee that’s neat” for me.

Second, the Little Woman from her years of shopping when she didn’t work while the children grew up, could find the shortest and most efficient way to go from one point too another. If we would need 2 cars for some reason, she would leave 10 minutes later than I did, and would always arrive 10 minutes before I did. I would have the speeding ticket, from my pathetic attempts to beat her to our common destinations, and the Little Woman would act as if it wasn’t a big deal. God, I hate that. But the GPS will change all that for me, and I tested my theory this very morning on the way to work. It takes a little getting used to, and once I get used to it, I will continue to test my theory. But excuse me, for now I need to find a gas station.

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