NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: A GPS story
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Jul 12, 23:44 -0700
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Jul 12, 23:44 -0700
True story (and not as weird as the earlier ones). A sailing friend of mine has a Garmin 76csx with both land maps and charts stored within.
A few years ago he decided to take his wife to a romantic dinner on the Santa Cruz (California) Pier.
He entered the address for the restaurant, but the GPS claimed it didn't recognize it. "No problem," my friend thought -- he remembered that there was a red buoy just off the pier. He brought up the appropriate chart and clicked on the buoy as a destination.
The GPS faithfully gave him road directions from his home to Santa Cruz and to the pier. The very last direction it issued
was "slight right turn off pier, destination is straight ahead." Fortunately, he was smart enough not to follow that one....
Sadly, my friend claims a subsequent software update now prevents "mixing the pickles" as he did.
From: Geoffrey Kolbe <geoffreykolbe@compuserve.com>
To: NavList@fer3.com
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2012 11:14 PM
Subject: [NavList] Re: A GPS story
Frank wrote:
> There was another "GPS" story recently here locally in which a woman claimed that her car had ended up in a bunker (sand trap) on a golf course because her GPS told her to turn there. And that's how the tv news prefaced the story: "her GPS did it". The story concluded "police charged her with DUI and found that she was well over the legal alcohol limit". Yeah, that makes more sense.
There was a case some years ago when BMW first had an in-car GPS system. A driver in his new BMW was driving up a road next to the Rhine when his in-car GPS system instructed him to turn left - despite the fact that the bridge that was supposed to be there, obviously wasn't..... He wasn't drunk, just a good German who did what he was told.
Geoffrey
