Ok, so I haven't achieved anything particularly significant so far this weekend. Not too many things that I would have regretted putting off, but you can't do something momentus every day!!
I did have something with of a run in with something I don't like and usually think it better to try to avoid.
I'm not a big fan of sat nav. To be honest, I'm not a big fan of many funky new technologies. I still have a video collection, I'm still waiting for mini discs to catch on after taking a punt on the last "next craze", and all the things modern mobile phones can confuses me to the point of feeling like a pensioner trying to heat bread in a VCR.
I've also seen what happens to sat nav addicts. If you're a regular user, it kills off your sense of direction cells and you become completely reliant on it and helpless without it. I know one addict who will blindly follow it, no matter what it suggests, and have absolutely no idea that they've been led astray. They're shocked when they do the same journey with you and it takes half the time. So I avoid the GPS wherever possible.
But I also have an inbuilt, and irreversible, pride regarding my sense of direction. "I don't need a sat nav. I'm resourceful and I know roughly which direction I need to go in, we'll be fine." On this occasion, though,I was going somewhere new, to collect something from people I didn't know, and they were expecting us on time. So I overcame the desire to plough my own trail and borrowed a friend's (pink) sat nav.
A lot of things have happened in the world since the first sat nav came out. They've not been short of time to develop them into machines that can actually be of some use. I feel it's also worth pointing out that this machine was created by the same species that managed to walk on the moon 40 years ago. But somehow, the little German-accented woman, sweet though she sounded, couldn't muster the navigational prowess to get me the four miles of the journey that I didn't know without making several catastrophic blunders.
She was fine on the easy bit, the motorway, that I already knew. It was only when we got to the dark, winding country lanes where it all got a bit much for her and she simply resorted to telling me drive 1.9 miles and turn left, no matter which direction I headed in. I don't know who programmed her, but surely they could have come up with something better than the old (and to my knowledge, unproven) myth of how to successfully navigate a garden maze!
So it was no thanks to technology that I made it there, (almost) on time, and she spent a disgruntled journey home in the glove box, no doubt barking berations at me for not going down her favourite roads! I'll stick to making toast in the VCR and actually getting to the place I'm trying to go, thank you very much.
