Monday: My GPS makes me feel guilty.

Last year for Christmas, Ken bought me a GPS. I don’t mean this past Christmas, I mean Christmas two years ago, technically. I never installed it, because a) I have an innate sense of where I’m going b) I lie about my innate sense of where I’m going, so I use Mapquest a lot, and c) I hate winter, so it was always too cold to put it in my SUV, and I only ever thought about it during the winter. But a few weeks ago, Ken decided that I should have it in my new car, just in case I got a job in Toronto. That sounds like a weird long shot, but it turns out I DID get a job in Toronto, which just goes to show that Ken is prophetic AND practical. Anyway, he installed it, or at least tried to, in my new Chevy Sonic. But there were some significant issues with the Tom-Tom, which is a stupid name anyway, and always makes me think of Jacob Two Two, and his Hooded Fang, because the GPS is just like having a Hooded Fang in the car anyway. The first sign of trouble was when it kept coming un-suctioned from the suction cup attaching it to my console. I’d turn a corner and the whole thing would fly through the air at me like a pissy poltergeist was controlling it. Then we actually tried to use it, and the real problem made itself abundantly clear: its sole purpose was to make me feel sad and guilty, because the voice of my GPS was a very pleasant woman—well, pleasant at first, but don’t cross her, because she can be pretty tyrannical. Everything was going fine for the first little while, with her telling us to turn right, or that there was an intersection coming up, but then we made the fatal mistake of GOING A DIFFERENT WAY. Then she was all like, “Turn right here”, trying to redirect us back to the route SHE had picked, and she started to sound more and more sulky. Then things started to get really dramatic, and we somehow ended up in Ajax instead of Toronto. Well, not really, but according to her, that’s where we were supposed to go , and if we didn’t want her advice, well screw us, we could just rot in Ajax. For the record, I don’t even know where Ajax IS, but if it’s my punishment for defying the GPS, then I don’t WANT to know. Anyway, a couple of days later, I was driving with Kate, and we decided to try the GPS lady again, hoping she had forgiven me for my past cartographical transgressions. We were going into Kitchener, and wanted to practice programming it, and thought we had done everything right, when the whole monitor part went crazy and started flying around the car. The next thing we knew, she was trying to direct us to Stratford, and kept yelling at us about going up some Regional Road every time we came to an intersection. Let me just clarify here that I actually KNEW where I was going, since I drive the same way to work every day, but she was f*cking relentless about us taking a road that looked like it went through some kind of swampland. The more we ignored her, the more insistent she got, until finally, I just yanked the plug out of my cigarette lighter thing-y. Kate calls this “rage-quitting” and I think it’s an accurate description of the way you feel when you get sick of being manipulated by your passive-aggressive GPS. (Ken just told me that he was “fiddling around” with the GPS the other day, which sounds slightly infidelity-ish, and that you can program it to talk with a different voice. I said unless it sounded like Darth Vader, or Bane from Batman, or my mother, there was NO WAY I was taking directions from it. And if it DID sound like my mother, it would keep asking me why I wasn’t wearing a scarf because it’s cold out, you know. Now it’s in his truck. I hope she makes him happy.)