MY LIFE - Revenge of the GPS

It may be a simple case of anthropomorphizing, but I really believe our GPS deliberately led us astray to teach us a lesson. It happened earlier this week when my three sisters and I drove to upstate New York for a family funeral.

As I picked my sisters up on Tuesday morning, I reminded my sister Bev to bring her GPS. Although we were heading into what was generally familiar territory, we knew that over the course of our expected two-day stay we would most likely need a little additional help in getting around.

Our hotel was in Latham and the funeral home was about a mile away in Cohoes, right down the street from where our grandparents had lived. However, the challenge would come the following day, with Mass in Clifton Park, burial in Waterford, and then back to Clifton Park for the collation. Neat, orderly funeral processions can be counted on to take you just so far.

For those of you who have never used a GPS, let me give you a basic description of how they work. Before you leave, you tap the address of where you want to go onto the screen. Then, using satellites, the GPS determines exactly where you are and with both verbal and on-screen directions, tells you, turn by turn, where to go as you drive. If you miss a turn or fail to respond as directed, it will tell you that it is re-calculating and give you new prompts to put you back on course. It's pretty amazing.

What I had failed to realize, however, was that ours seemed to have tender feelings and would get ticked off if you repeatedly ignored its instructions, eventually giving you a smack down.

We had disrespected it in a minor way when we left the funeral home on Tuesday evening, electing to ignore the "turn right" command in favor of turning left and returning to the hotel the same way we had earlier come, with the GPS trying to redirect us the whole way.

We didn't insult it big time, however, until the following day.

As we drove out of the cemetery gates in the pouring rain, the GPS clearly said to "turn left."

"But the cars are all going right," I hurriedly said. "What should I do?"

"Follow the cars," my sisters directed, and so I did, for several miles, with the GPS recalculating and trying to redirect us all the way. Only upon recognizing familiar landmarks did we realized that the vehicles in front of us were apparently bringing people back to their own cars at the funeral home, and we turned around. Even then, though, we continued to ignore the voice for a little while longer as we strolled down memory lane, driving through neighborhoods we had known as children.

Once we buckled down and got back to business, however, we obeyed the voice as it instructed us. "Drive 1.8 miles, and then turn right. In .2 miles, turn left," etc. Out into the country we went, blithely following directions, doing as the voice told us.

And then I missed a turn, mostly because it looked more like a driveway than a road. But the GPS had us take the next left, then a right, a right, and a right, back to the missed turn and into a seedy-looking trailer park.

"We must be taking a shortcut," I theorized.

One last turn, deep into a dead end in the trailer park, and the computerized voice smugly announced, "You have arrived at your destination."

"I don't freakin' think so," I answered back, shifting into reverse and carefully making my way back to the main road.

I may have been imagining it, but I could swear I heard a faint snicker as the voice slowly set us back on the correct path to the Van Patten Country Club, miles away, where lunch awaited.

- Rhea Bouchard Powers is a writer from Cumberland.