I'm A Slow Learner

So, this morning we had a minor family emergency. (Don't worry, everyone is fine... you can tell because if they weren't I wouldn't be blogging today.) But, since I have learned over the last couple of years to play things a little closer to the vest on the world wide web, that is not what we will be discussing on this post. The point is that this emergency required me to immediately get into my car and take off for Framingham, heading for a building I had never been to before. I figured this is exactly the kind of situation GPS was invented for, so I looked up the location on the "points of interest" list and started out. My GPS and I had our first disagreement right away. You see, this brand of GPS always wants to send me on the most direct route as the crow flies, which can lead you down a lot of narrow and curvy backroads where reduced speeds are a good idea and therefore it is not always the quickest way. Since I wanted to get where I was going as fast as I could get there I decided to ignore that suggestion and headed for the highway, thinking that while I might have to go a couple extra miles, I would also be covering that extra ground 20 mph faster. Apparently, the lesson I had to learn the hard way when I first got the GPS (which was to not question my GPS) didn't sink all the way in.

I started to turn down onto the highway and was greeted with completely stopped traffic. Now, I'm not giving the GPS credit for that. There are some brands of them which will help you avoid gridlock, but I don't have that kind. I'm much more willing to chalk that traffic jam up to the karma of the day. I immediately took the off-ramp and got back onto the road I had just been on, because simple math will tell you that going 30 mph down back roads is better than going 0 on the highway. Fortunately, my GPS was in a forgiving mood so rather than have to double all the way back for a couple miles to return to the point when it wanted me to go right and I turned left, it gave me a much earlier turn option and directed me down a labyrinth of side streets and back-country roads. It took a while before I could even tell what town I was in, but soon enough I recognized that I was slowly inching closer to my destination. It was a convoluted way to get where I wanted to go, but it was certainly a lot faster than sitting in stopped traffic trying to get to Route 9. You would think that I would have learned my lesson for the day, but I hadn't.

As I was one town away from my destination when I started seeing signs for the MetroWest Medical Center, which was where I was headed. I thought it was weird to start seeing signs for a place when according to the GPS I was still about 5 miles away, but figured that perhaps there was some kind of regulation which stated that hospitals had to put up more directional signage than other kinds of places. So, I stopped following my GPS and started following the signs. The GPS was mostly agreeing with me anyway, so I figured I was heading in the right direction. Suddenly, the MetroWest Medical Center appeared next to me. According to the GPS I still had a few miles until I got there, but I figured this was just a stroke of luck as clearly the GPS had planned to send me to entirely the wrong place. Turning it off I hopped out of my car, thinking that I was lucky to stumble upon the place I needed to go while the obviously stupid machine was clearly trying to send me to the wrong location and that perhaps the tenor of the day was finally starting to change. Yeah, not so much. Turns out there are two MetroWest Medical Centers and I was at the wrong one. At that point I returned to my car, turned the GPS back on, turned off my brain, mindlessly did what the car told me to do and arrived at my destination 15 minutes later.

The thing about this internal struggle I have with following the machine versus following my instincts is that I know it shouldn't happen, because I am fully aware that I own a terrible sense of both direction and distance. First off, I think everything is 30-45 minutes away, regardless of where it is. On top of that geography was never my strong suit. I was watching the local Doppler radar channel the other day to see if a particularly bad line of thunderstorms was heading my way. It listed a series of towns in Massachusetts which were currently under a storm advisory. Not only did I not have a clue where they were located in the state in which I have lived in my entire life, I'm still not even sure they were all real towns. (Seriously, one of the towns listed might have been Narnia.) I guess my inability to just trust the GPS to be right is just a result of not wanting to have too much faith in some machine, especially since I have heard so many horror stories about people driving in circles because their GPS has no idea where they have to go. But apparently I should have a little more faith in the programmers who built it, because even though I haven't updated the maps in a while it is still accurate a lot more than I am. Not to mention, it sure beats going back to geography class to try and memorize the maps myself, because that clearly isn't going to work. Let's be honest - if I can't learn to listen to the GPS, I've got no chance to remember where the hell Dracut is.