OccasionalGPSUse

Contemplating a new GPS, I was struck by a comment about GPS apps on a phone being good enough for "occasional" use. The fact is, I'm not an occasional GPS user. I'm not totally convinced that occasional GPS users, in the sense of people who only need a GPS that's good enough for occasional use, exist. If you're not used to using a GPS, and you're thinking of it the way you'd think of a map, that makes sense; but in actual use, the whole point of the device is that you don't have to treat it like a map where you haul it out on special occasions. If your GPS is only worth using like that, you are not experiencing the joy of going, hey, I need a gas station, ask the GPS where the nearest one is. Or even just of Not Worrying about how to get to a new place.

In any case, even if there are occasional GPS users, I am not one. Sure, I don't go that many new places in an average week. But I still use the GPS in an average week. Why? Because I have no sense of direction. For instance, every other week I take Opal to bujinkan. The dojo is not hard to get to. In fact, it is off one of the three freeway exits in San Francisco that are on my mental map (4th and 7th St from 80, and 19th from, what is that, 1?). You get off the freeway. You turn left. You are there. The fourth (fourth!) time I drove there I decided I didn't need the GPS. I turned left too soon. I did manage to recover (a miracle in itself), but it was more stressful than it needed to be. And if the relevant alley didn't dead-end into Whole Foods, I don't think I'd have recovered without pulling over and asking the GPS. (As it was, I knew I had undershot, and knew I couldn't overshoot from the alley.)

So I use the GPS to go to all sorts of places you'd think I could get to. I use the GPS often enough that Opal, who finds the voice interrupts her stories, is quite judgmental about it. "Mom! You don't need that thing! You really know how to get there!" Well, maybe I do, and maybe I don't. But it will probably be calmer and less eventful if the little voice tells me soothingly that I am in the right place.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking TomTom. I like the IQ routes, and Garmin and Magellan have both made me sulky. (Garmin! Why should I give you the house number before the street, so that you can then fail to tell me it doesn't exist and route me to a random end of the street? Oh, and if I have 6 destinations, I do not want either to have to enter them in reverse order or to be unable to reorder them. Magellan! Make the stupid thing WORK reliably, and for goodness sake, the cable goes to the mount, not the device, so you don't have to plug it into an invisible little socket every time. And both of you? You suck at avoiding roads. Oh, sure, you pretend to let me avoid a road you like, but then you sneak back to the route you're fixated on. So I just drive on, listening to you whining at me to go your way, fuming to myself and waiting for you to give up. Pfaugh.)