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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).
I’ve a friend who can’t follow directions to save his life.
Every time, it’s just a migraine trying to figure out how this guy manages to get through life.
Like once he was taking his kids to the MN zoo, from north west of the twin cities.
“Okay, so you’re gonna to want to come down 94, take 494 south to 35W south, go to McAndrews Road- you’ll see the brown signs for “zoo”, so you can just follow those, but’ll go left on McAndrews and the zoo is on the left a bit down the road- you’ll see the big signs and tiger and stuff.”
He takes 694, instead of 494, goes around until it becomes 494, and around some more until he’s back on the north side before he decides to call.
He’s back where 494/694 on that side do the merge thing and go to 94 proper.
We get him onto 694, which would also connect him to 35w, he’d just go through the city is all.
He panics or something and gets on hwy 100. Okay. No big deal, take that to 494, take 494 to 35W,
Somehow misses the 100/494 interchange despite literally working at that exit for 3 years…
Gets dumped onto Normandale BLVRD, and instead of realizing maybe something’s wrong, (gee not a higway anymore…) he gets angry because my instructions are “too complicated” and “they keep changing”, and “why did I give him directions if I don’t know the roads?!”.
Meanwhile his GPS in the background has given up giving him directions.
He’s pissed because his kids are frustrated they don’t actually get to the zoo, because he can’t follow directions through an area he should actually know because he’s lived here is entire life.
There’s an anxiety that takes hold when people are lost. It can make people very irritable and cause them to rash things because it feels better to do something even if it’s the wrong thing. I’ve found this out from years of backpacking using a map and compass. GPS software is a great thing but I can understand why some people don’t trust it, it’s not without it’s faults. You can’t trust it explicitly. IMO because of this technology we are losing our ability to know where we are in a space. Following the linear directions from a GPS app we don’t picture where we are in relation to our destination. Your friend probably had memorized how to get to his job at that exit by arriving at it from a particular direction. Deviation from the norm threw him off. It’s interesting how technology changes us and we become dependent on it. I grew up reading maps before GPS having had delivery jobs, still have the county map books. There was a time when people navigated by stars at night and by following flowing water.
He doesn’t get to blame GPS… he started driving before that was common; and in any case, these highways have been where they are for even longer (so it’s not a map issue on navigation,)
These are the largest interstates in the area and the interchanges literally have signs telling you they’re coming up for a mile or more.
We’re talking about a guy that fucked up going to Kansas City when it’s literally just a matter of jumping on 35 (either works,) and going south. (He got lost going through Des Moines. Ended up on 80 in Iowa city. That was when his wife stopped letting him navigate cross country.)
Send this man to the store for milk, block his phone number, and let him lose himself to the road. I’m frustrated just hearing about him lmao.
I too grew up navigating with paper maps. The one thing I hate hate hate about GPS navigation systems in cars is their insistence that up=forward instead of up=north. I know you can change settings for this but sometimes you forget to set it and when going to an unfamiliar location the constant rotating of the map is more disorienting than anything.
Tell him to look into Dyspraxia.
He’s a 40 yo man, I’m not going to be telling him his business. if he feels it impacts his life too much, he can talk to his doctor about it.
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I wouldn’t suggest drugs. there’s no other indication of drugs. the other things… maybe, I’m not his doctor, though.
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I’m in the annoying position of actually being able to blame my GPS. Not my navigation app, the actual GPS signal. My incompetent government, as you might have heard on the news in the past year, has decided to provoke every other country in the region (and plenty more elsewhere) into a regional war. So now in “self defense” from guided missiles, they are constantly jamming GPS signals in my city and some other areas of the country. My GPS has been telling me for months that I’m in Beirut.
Somehow this precaution isn’t necessary in Tel Aviv though? Curious…
Today in my part of the world it looks like my GPS weather is good.
(I hope that you will be safe out there)
Thanks.
The situation on the ground is actually not as bad as that. I think most of the jamming affects aircraft a lot worse than grounded devices. Still, in Haifa (city in the northern half of Israel) even on the ground you can almost never get a good signal of your actual position.
Your government has been very competent at liquidating families, though.
I have traveled a decent amount. For new places using gps get around works but what’s key for me is building a mental map, especially when walking around on foot.
I’m going to rant a bit bear with me. Have you ever read a book that described a room (“The pub was cozy and small. A well cleaned bar gleamed along the wall to the side and the restroom door was across from it on the other”) only to give direction way later that throws off your mental image (“he took a sharp left and walked to the restroom”)? If it doesn’t match how things looked in your head it can be disorienting to the reader. I hate that feeling and the same thing can happen during navigation.
I make an effort to check maps of a city to get a lay of the land even though I know I have gps to help. I never fully memorise stuff but when I see any landmarks or streets they have some context and I know where it should go on the mental map. Sometimes I might be temporarily unsure of my exact location but I don’t get hopelessly lost.
I wish books gave me a small map of every location so I don’t need to just guess what the author might have been imagining while writing, specifically because of this nonsense.
But eh, who am I kidding, I don’t read books anymore :/
Fun fact about some languages no having words for left/right.
This helps with orientation (important for navigation) but also stuff like arranging items east to west according to age.
edit: when sorting by age.
There’s another great example of a language based on a small island with a hill/mountain in the middle where their words for direction are polar. Essentially, clockwise/anticlockwise and shoreward/inland, instead of left/right and forward/back.
edit: it’s the island of Manam. Wikipedia has a great picture of the island showing its central volcano.
Ah yes, turnwise and widdershins.
He’s like, your GPS isn’t bad. I can track you just fine.
So… kinda like a wavefunction?
