Mind Scalpel

Some blogs and web sites review consumer products by giving you useless and irrelevant information like price, ease of use, feature sets and quality.

Not this one! Here, we’re just concerned with the things that really matter about products – the social problems they solve, or introduce, in real life, not some ridiculously objective findings derived from some comprehensive, carefully-considered, long-term test.

Take, for example, those fancy GPS navigation units that everyone is getting in their cars (and, concomitantly, getting stolen from their cars, which, in my opinion, is just about the height of irony – “Hey, what happened to your highly-precise satellite-linked geolocation unit?” “I don’t know! I have no idea where it is!”).

It’s true, I finally got one as a gift, and I’ve been using it with some success, but mostly with catastrophic failure. So, to save some of you GPS novices out there from some traps for the unwary, I have put together a few pointers from bitter personal experience:

• Your GPS unit cannot be used as a substitute for visibility out of your windshield! So, no driving in total fog, white-out conditions, or while waiting for your windshield to defrost by referencing only your GPS screen. Turns out that in spite of its resemblance to a “heads-up display” there’s a slight mismatch between where your GPS is showing you to be on that steep mountainside road and where you actually are on the steep mountainside road. So scrape that windshield!
• A corollary to the above: the “traffic” feature on your GPS only gives you a general warning about traffic conditions. It does not warn you specifically that you are about to ram the specific stopped car in front of you. Why, I ask you, was that omitted? Jeepers.
• A corollary to both of the above: GPS units can survive, with only a few scratches, airbag deployments and drops from high places that include 65 mph transverse velocities.
• GPS units just care about roads. They will not help you find your way out of massive shopping mall parking lots. Further, they won’t warn you that you’re about to slam over a tire-popping berm in a massive shopping mall parking lot.
• No GPS units ever say “please.” There’s not even an optional “politeness” setting on any of them. They just order you around. This is understandable, given the GPS system’s military origins, but still discomfiting.
• GPS units function only literally. Despite advances in technology, and your GPS’s “take me home” button, metaphorically speaking you still can’t go home again.
• GPS units will only give you directions to your destination. They won’t tell you whether it’s worth going there, or, for that matter, whether it’s worth leaving the house at all on any particular day. People would pay a lot of money for both of those features, let me tell you.
• Don’t use your GPS unit to practice your Japanese. Contrary to all stereotypes about submissive Asian women, you’ll typically end up with a snippy little lady’s voice barking “Hidari ni. Iye! Iye! Abunai! Hidari ni! … Aiiee. Baka gaijin!” at you.
• Don’t spring for the optional “sexy woman’s voice” to give you directions. It creates a real potential for misunderstanding when you’re speaking with your wife on your cell phone and she overhears some breathless woman murmuring something provocative at you in your car.

Corollary to the final point above: Do not, at all costs, attempt to extricate yourself from that misunderstanding by explaining that it was just the optional “sexy woman’s voice” on your GPS giving you directions. The fact that you actually paid money for that option will just take your conversation down an unexpected road that, GPS or not, you really don’t want to travel.

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