Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for September 11, 2010

Good to the last drop.

Looks all downhill from here.

“Come fly with me Lucille”

Whatever happened to “keep your eye on the road”?

Title card for The Terminator: The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind had raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present. Tonight…

Sisyphos, how can you when you’ve got your eyes on the GPS?

“You have reached Nirvana….”

Ya! Hoo! Thelma!

We do tend to focus on them too much when we’re driving. Not like back in the map days - nobody ever focused on the map and forgot to look at the road. Much.

In this case, GPS means “Gone Past Stop”.

My GPS, she has a name, “Miss Direction”

True story - When GPS were new in autos, a couple in a new luxury car faithfully followed the GPS straight into the water and a sinking feeling. Turns out that the GPS failed to make clear that you needed to wait on the ferry!

Please fasten seatbelts & put your trays in the upright positon ,until the pilot has given the ‘all clear’ signal.

I have, on occation, compared GPS to mother-in-laws. See, I was right!

Not far-fetched at all. In two separate incidents in 2008, two drivers listened to GPS and ignored their eyes, turning onto railroad tracks in Bedford Falls, NY then stalling before oncoming trains. Both cars were destroyed, although the drivers escaped.

… True about the two incidents in 2008, but in both cases, it was never reported that the GPS instructions were wrong - instead, the drivers may have misinterpreted the instructions (I assume the latter, since the former would have had liability implications?)

about once or twice a week i have truck drivers, tourists, and even an out-of-town cop pull in to my station (i work at a metro tunnel in hampton, va) either out of compliance with restrictions, or just plain lost, enroute to nc, or other points south by way of richmond….. their gps was sending them north to I95 south, via I64 west, instead of south via i64 east & US58west to I95. gps gave them about an 80 mile ¨detour¨ through some of the most horrible traffic in the region. the solution? i show them on an old fashioned tree-ware item called a MAP. works every time. duh. .

I had a GPS take me on a roundabout route through the back roads of Temecula. We kept following it for a laugh until it wanted us to use a private driveway to get to the next road over. We laughed so hard it hurt.

To steal the punchline from another cartoonist’s similar strip…

“Recalculating.”

Yeah, except “Frankenstein” said the same thing about biology and we never listened to Shelley either, we merely enjoy the movies and ignore the gene splicing. And keep believing our destiny is in our own hands.

Wasn’t this an episode of “The Office”?

Amazing….we can parallel park a Rover on Mars but can’t find grandma’s house here on earth.

@Gigantor: Wasn’t Bedford Falls re-named Potterville?

Be sure to get pictures.

There have been at least a couple cases in Oregon where people followed GPS directions without enough thought. In at least one case, they wound up snowbound on a Forest Service road, with tragic results for the father.

Thanks to the previous owners of the car…

GPS does not equal replacements for maps and compasses. In many cases the people who follow them blindly and end up in trouble don’t understand how the technology works…and doesn’t work. Working in IT, I see every weekday what twits with tech can do–and it’s NOT pretty. Blame the tech all you want, but the fundamental flaw is still the human factor.

Hehe, good one, Wiley. A GPS is a computer, the most literal thing next to aspies like me. Not being very, very specific is an invitation to misinterpretation.

Reminds me of the old mistake Google Maps had on directions from New York to Paris - Step 23 was “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean….3462 miles”. Google has since fixed it, but if you want to see their original directions, it’s here on a video:

Google: N.Y. To Paris

Um, that’s almost at your most exciting destination…

There have been too many stories over the past three or four years of GPS leading drivers into near-fatal or fatal situations. As I said to the rental car clerk who asked if I also wanted to rent a GPS, “No thanks, I’m smart enough to know how to read a map!!!!!”

My great-uncle visited from out of state, and rented a car with a GPS. We went to the beach, and from the (huge) parking lot, asked the GPS for directions home. The parking lot was not programmed into the GPS, so the screen showed us in the middle of a green field. The first directions were, “Please find your way to a known road.”

On a similar vein, we were driving on a recently rerouted highway. The GPS insisted that the mountain the new route had cut through, was not safe to be driving at 80 MPH on.

@etkd

Both of those are perfect examples of why GPS will never replace maps and compasses, and how not knowing how the tech works just causes headaches. The tech can only function as well as its data, and all too often that data is out of date unless a person is updating it regularly with new maps off the Internet. A GPS is basically a computer: to get it work right and get the most out of it, you have to know how to use it properly.

And as for rent-a-car GPS? Don’t waste your money. If you think you’ll need one, buy your own, learn how to use it, and download the most up-to-date maps of the area you’re going to. Even then, don’t neglect to take the most recently printed road map you can get. It’s just common sense.