Not all that long ago, when we needed to go somewhere unfamiliar, we used a map. I was never able to read a map. I could stare at it for twenty minutes and still not have the faintest idea where I was. The trouble with maps is that roads run in all different directions. They are marked as coloured lines, numbers and tiny symbols which presumably meant something to someone but absolutely nothing to me!
I would turn the map this way, then that way, then upside down, trying to make the road in front of me correspond with the road on paper. In those far off days my husband still thought that I had some navigational skills. Bless him. How wrong he was! He regarded map reading as a perfectly straightforward, logical activity.
He’d hand me the map and say ‘You navigate’. What he failed to appreciate was that I never had any idea what I was supposed to do with it! He could glance at a map and know where we were, where we needed to go and which road we had to take. He never understood how I could find something so simple, so complicated! To me a map was just a collection of coloured spaghetti! The final indignity would come when I had to fold the map back up! It unfolded in seconds but getting it back into its original shape was a feat requiring the patience of a saint and the spatial awareness of an origami expert.
So, when satnavs arrived I welcomed them with open arms! What a wonderful invention! I would know where I was, where I was going and precisely how long it would take me to get there! All I had to do was enter the address, press start and obey instructions. Simple!
The first time I used a satnav it had a very pleasant female voice, calm, measured and reassuring. She never got flustered and she never swore. Her directions were simple. ‘At the next roundabout take the fourth exit’. Except, when I was approaching the roundabout at forty miles an hour, there were at least six exits with a motor bike, a tractor and a white van filling the three lanes in front of me.
‘Take the fourth exit’.
Which one was the fourth? I tried to count as I drove past each one, struggling to move into the left lane because there was a car sitting on my bumper. I had begun to panic but the satnav remained calm.
‘Now take the fourth exit’.
Thank you, I heard the first time.
I immediately take the next exit and find myself heading north up the M6 instead of south down the M56. This was not a minor navigational error. This mistake involved sitting on the motorway heading up to Scotland! The satnav remained calm. There was no panic in her voice, not even a hint of ‘now why did you turn down the wrong exit when I kept on reminding you which one to take!’ She simply said ‘recalculating’.
A while later she announced ‘in two hundred yards take the next left’.
Unfortunately I had already sailed past that exit at motorway speed.
‘Take the next left’.
There wasn’t a next left or even the possibility of a next left! There was, however, a great deal of motorway stretching ahead and I was travelling in completely the wrong direction.
‘Recalculating’, came her dulcet tones.
It was at this point that I felt she could begin to lose patience but, after several more instructions and an unnecessary tour of the North West, I was reunited with the correct route. I learnt an important lesson that day. When the satnav says it’s ’recalculating’ it isn’t necessarily correcting my mistake. It’s simply working out how much further it can send me before I realise that I have gone completely the wrong way!
Sadly satnavs don’t have a sense of humour. If I’ve missed a turning they don’t say, ‘never mind, we all make mistakes’. They just say ‘recalculating’. There is something deeply judgemental about that word. It sounds as if I’ve disappointed her.
‘Keep right’, she’ll tell me.
Right where?
‘Bear left’.
How much?
‘Continue straight’.
For how long?
My personal favourite is ‘Your destination is on the right’.
Excellent, but I’m travelling at thirty miles an hour and there is nowhere to pull in, the car behind me is in my boot and the only thing on my right is a hedge! Perhaps she knows something that I don’t? Perhaps there’s a secret tunnel? Perhaps I’m expected to drive through the hedge?
The best thing about a satnav is the one blue line. It’s only one colour and the only one I need to follow! It’s displayed on the screen in confidence and stretches ahead, leading me towards my final destination. But it doesn’t know about road works or diversions and often hasn’t realise that another road has replaced it.
I rarely use the satnav. Each time I do she treats me like a new recruit who has somehow failed the basic training so is given instructions with patient, military precision. I get reintroduced to a system that I will never fully master. I no longer question her authority, I simply try to obey like a mildly confused apprentice who’s not really up for the job.
And so it remains that we’ll never be best friends, only rare acquaintances who meet when needs must and communicate under sufferance! 👠
Jenny Burrell 