Goodbye Personal Servant

Personal servant? That may be a bit much, though truly that little machine, our faithful GPS served in so many ways -- not only keeping us on track to many destinations, but keeping us out of trouble.

He (yes, I have no hesitation in calling him a 'he' -- after all, his name was Simon, and he had a lovely English accent) came into our lives in 2011, part of the acquisitions we made when we set out on our cross-continent tour in 2011. Wending our way through the complicated cloverleaf highways in the US would have been nearly impossible without him. At the very least, the relationship between the Dear Man and me might not have survived my map-reading skills. Call him a subtle peacemaker. Which way do we go? No arguments; just ask Simon.

Sure, there were a few times his satellite connections fed him information that was less than accurate, but generally these errors led us into strange and wonderfully off-the-beaten track surprises. Once we found ourselves not at the campsite we'd been seeking, but instead in the midst of horse-and-buggy 'traffic' in Amish territory.

Keeping us out of trouble came with his speed limit alert feature. So many little towns seem to rely on income from speeding tickets issued to tourists who might happen to miss the suddenly-low speed limit at the town boundaries. The warning sound Simon emitted was, fortunately, enough to get us to slow down from highway speed to the safely low numbers they expected. Whew! He more than paid for himself in fines saved.

This seems like the right day to bid him farewell, as it's the anniversary of when we got home from the big tour, eight years ago.

Despite poking around for better photos of Simon than the 'farewell' shot of him (out of focus, no less), I've failed. Best I could come up with was a link to this shot taken during the big road trip, where it appears we've gone off-road on some parallel trail. I'm pretty sure it was just a construction-induced detour.

It isn't that I took lots of pictures of him, but now and then, it just seemed too fun not to. Best were when we were heading across some body of water in a ferry. The little blue Volkswagen Beetle (his avatar) looked as though it was magically gliding atop the water. Silly, I suppose, but then silly generally is my middle name.

He's gone -- to wherever the electronics recycling items go, hopefully not back to the Philippines where so much unwanted Canadian garbage turned up. I like to think he's gone to where someone or thing gets to guide him for a change -- a bit of payback for all the gentle guidance he gave to us.

No $ale

All I wanted to do was buy some tape. Some good sturdy clear tape that would hold up, no matter the weather.

But it turned out, because there was no bar code on the roll, the worker behind the counter couldn't ring up the sale.

I asked him, "But it's clear, look at the display. The price of a roll is $2.99. Can't you just ring that in manually?"

"Nope."

It's true. My paranoia is justified. The machines are definitely keeping us in our place. I'd say this is yet another proof that they're winning.

An e-Sign of the Times

Yesterday was a travel day. It was only two flights, but there were far too many airport shuttles, and way too much sitting around.

In the waiting area at LAX, I couldn’t help noticing how just about everyone was hooked up to some sort of electronic device. Most of them were talking on cell phones, texting, or playing games to pass the time. Several were reading – but from Kindles or other e-readers.

Aside from a couple who were reading from old-fashioned print newspapers, I only spotted one other person reading from a traditional print-format publication. Ironically, he was reading Wired, the magazine that's all about e-communication.

And then, later the news, with the day's final irony: Steve Jobs, the man who had initiated so much of this, had died.

Even if his devices mostly seem to start with an ‘i’, he certainly did a lot to extend the bounds of our physical world to the one we inhabit now, a decidedly e-world.

Reconstruction

As we drive through the U.S., we keep seeing reminders of the many terrible storms this year's spring has delivered.

Near the airport in St. Louis, we saw flattened buildings and trees. In Kentucky, near a roadworks site, there were trees that at first appeared to be the result of a very botched job of mechanized logging -- the complete branchwork torn off, the trunks sloppily torn. But then, the terrible realization: this was the work of a tornado.

When we saw a house with a tree resting over top of it, our theory was confirmed.

While we haven't experienced tornadoes (touching wood and being thankful), this has been a week of some personal disasters. The small ones were a smashed jar (but what a miserable task finding all the tiny splinters of glass that exploded all over the little cabin of the RV) and later the same day, the discovery of tiny moths in one of the cupboards. Ack. It meant some small bags of foodstuffs (almonds, sunflower seeds, and sadly, the quinoa) had to be tossed.

But the worst? My computer. Major crash. For me, this is a personal disaster, although fortunately, critical files are on a back-up stick.

It's probably going to slow me down in the blog and other writing departments. Still, I'll do what I can. Interesting that all of this should occur when we're just about at the halfway point of our trip.

It's certainly made me realize just how much I depend on a machine as an extension of myself. For without words, who am I?

Simon says...

Simon is the name we call the little man who lives inside the GPS. He has an English accent, and is always very polite, even when he's telling us (for the third time) to "Please turn around as soon as it is possible."

Although we do our best to keep him up to speed by letting him on the Internet too, the updates don't always work, especially in construction zones. Sometimes those little diversions confuse him.

If you look at the photo above, you'll see that Simon seems to think we're off in a field someplace. Another time, when we were taking a ferry, the little blue VW that serves as our avatar appeared to driving over the water -- shades of Herbie the Love Bug!

While at first I scoffed, thinking a GPS was 'just another gadget', we would have been lost without him. And I say this quite literally, especially when we tried to find the place we planned to stop near Louisville, KY -- a feat that required crossing the Ohio River into Kentucky, then taking a complicated series of cloverleafs so we could get to a town in Indiana. Huh!?

But my next stop is one that Simon didn't have a hand in.