In my experience, people with “bad GPS” tend to disregard the GPS directions because they think they know better. Once they are good and lost, and the GPS is freaking out and frantically trying to reroute is about when they start to complain that the GPS is useless.
Not GPS, but I found myself waking up in the back seat of a car when some friends and I had driven all night to catch a Violent Femmes concert in Pittsburgh. The sun was coming up and they hadn’t found our motel. This was in the days of printed MapQuest directions.
I asked “Did you follow the directions from where they started?”
They said “We don’t need to start from there, we’ve already been there!”
I said, “Let me fuggin drive.”
So I get behind the wheel and start back tracking to the previously established starting point while they say over and over that we don’t need to start from there, they already know that spot, they just need to drive around a little longer and they’ll get there eventually.
And then I followed the directions, to the letter, from the starting point on the directions, right straight to the motel.
So the moral of the story is always follow the directions and don’t try to improv that shit, because you’ll find yourself lost in Pittsburgh.
Also, holy shit, Pittsburgh is laid out on a triangle rather than a rectangular grid, and that will throw you right the fuck off your sense of direction if you’re not familiar, which none of us were.
I’ve definitely had some bad experiences with GPS.
Telling me which way I need to go far too late. Too late to get into the right lane to take the manoeuvre it recommends.
Misunderstanding the lanes so it seems to be telling me to take the next left, when what it actually means is continue straight at not just the next fork, but the fork after that, and then take the next left. (Seriously. This exact scenario happens so reliably to me on one major route near me that I’ve learnt to expect it.)
Routing me through a rat run of minor residential streets when the major roads aren’t even close to congested. Often involving an unprotected, unsignalled right turn across traffic to get back onto main roads, where I have to just hope there’s a gap in traffic in both directions at once. There are a few places it likes to do this that I’ve learnt to avoid, but that’s in cases where I’m not really relying on GPS for navigation per se, but to find which of the multiple routes I should take today (and because having GPS on is the only way to get it to show me GPS speed and enable the convenient podcast controls).
In my experience, people with “bad GPS” tend to disregard the GPS directions because they think they know better. Once they are good and lost, and the GPS is freaking out and frantically trying to reroute is about when they start to complain that the GPS is useless.
Not GPS, but I found myself waking up in the back seat of a car when some friends and I had driven all night to catch a Violent Femmes concert in Pittsburgh. The sun was coming up and they hadn’t found our motel. This was in the days of printed MapQuest directions.
I asked “Did you follow the directions from where they started?”
They said “We don’t need to start from there, we’ve already been there!”
I said, “Let me fuggin drive.”
So I get behind the wheel and start back tracking to the previously established starting point while they say over and over that we don’t need to start from there, they already know that spot, they just need to drive around a little longer and they’ll get there eventually.
And then I followed the directions, to the letter, from the starting point on the directions, right straight to the motel.
So the moral of the story is always follow the directions and don’t try to improv that shit, because you’ll find yourself lost in Pittsburgh.
Also, holy shit, Pittsburgh is laid out on a triangle rather than a rectangular grid, and that will throw you right the fuck off your sense of direction if you’re not familiar, which none of us were.
I’ve definitely had some bad experiences with GPS.
Telling me which way I need to go far too late. Too late to get into the right lane to take the manoeuvre it recommends.
Misunderstanding the lanes so it seems to be telling me to take the next left, when what it actually means is continue straight at not just the next fork, but the fork after that, and then take the next left. (Seriously. This exact scenario happens so reliably to me on one major route near me that I’ve learnt to expect it.)
Routing me through a rat run of minor residential streets when the major roads aren’t even close to congested. Often involving an unprotected, unsignalled right turn across traffic to get back onto main roads, where I have to just hope there’s a gap in traffic in both directions at once. There are a few places it likes to do this that I’ve learnt to avoid, but that’s in cases where I’m not really relying on GPS for navigation per se, but to find which of the multiple routes I should take today (and because having GPS on is the only way to get it to show me GPS speed and enable the convenient podcast controls).