Is it just me or driving around with a GPS increases your level of stoopid a tad? I mean there you are, driving along in your car, you think you know where you’re going, you think you’re in control, but guess what? YOU’RE NOT. Because if American English Linda or British English Collin tells you to turn right YOU WILL TURN RIGHT, buddy. There’s no buts about it.
Or else you’ll hear the most dreaded words that can come out of that control freak device “Make a U turn!”. And you know that if you must make a letter of the alphabet, it can be any of the 25, BUT the U. Heck, it can be an N tilde turn, but not a U turn. Because the U stands for U’re screwed, which is the short version of U’re on your own now, I told you what to do, but you wouldn’t listen!
I remember when, 2 summers ago, we were driving along highway 132 in Gaspésie, and I started whining about needing to use the facilities.
After we found the gas station in a small village slightly off the main road and I took care of the pending business, we asked our trusted companion, the GPS to take us back on highway 132. It took us on some winding little roads, alleys rather, and I was almost expecting a farmer to come out of the bushes with a shovel and holler and tell us in Quebecois that we were trespassing.
And all of a sudden, Linda (as I was saying, one of the multiple personalities of the GPS entity) tells us to take a right and we’ll end up on Boulevard Henri Bourassa. “That’s odd” I thought, “they have boulevards in the country?”, but if Linda was telling us that, well, who was I, who can’t even read a map unless it faces the right direction, to question her advice?
So we take a right. And what do you know? They DON’T have boulevards in the country. Or they don’t anymore. If they did, they just decided they didn’t like them boulevards no more and planted corn to cover ‘em up. Boulevard Henri Bourassa was a huge, big-ass corn field.
And Linda? Well, I guess she assumed we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a road and a cow trail because she stuck to her side of the story. She told us to take a left on the boulevard and drive for 2 km. Umm, I don’t think so. And not because we don’t trust you, Linda. But because THE CAR DOESN’T FIT ON THE FRIGGIN’ BOULEVARD!
So we turned around, and of course stubborn as she is, Linda gave us the cold shoulder and told us to make a U turn. She might as well have shown us her middle finger. That’s when we told her to take the afternoon off because, obviously she’d been under a lot of pressure. All that text-to-speech stuff is really wearisome.
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