Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Robots In Charge

I had a gig in Bath last night - all was going swimmingly until we came to drive home. We decided to use a sat nav. This sat nav was being a bitch.

I'm not entirely sure if she'd forgotten that the M5 existed and thought she was being genuinely useful, or if she'd just made the exceutive decision that the scenic route was more fun. At 1am. Either way - she was less than helpful and had she had a face I'd have happily bitten it. She didn't have a face and I thought my sister would have been mad if I'd started mauling her car accessories so I left her be.

At one stage when trying to leave Bath, she insisted that we only turn left for a good half hour. We honestly saw the same curry house 3 times as we circled the city. At this point I wondered if the sat nav had a burning desire to be Beyonce and we would be going 'to the left, to the left' all night until we shot her.

She then had a major panic attack as we tried to decide whether to use the A38 or the M5. All the humans in the car wanted to use the M5 as it was -
a) quicker
b) straight
c) easier to overtake bastard drivers who break at every opportunity. For a while we followed a small silver car who insisted on breaking at corners, other cars going the other way (on a two lane road...??), the top of hills, particularly big trees and green lights.

The sat nav sort of wanted to use the M5... in that she allowed us to get on to the M5 for about 20 yards and then she insisted we dive off on a sharp left down a slip road and back into Junction City. She'd clearly had a change of heart, perhaps there was a sense of foreboding about the M5, but we were now instead going to use the A38. So we headed off towards the A38... until we hit a tiny roundabout. Had we gone straight ahead, we would have continued down the A38 and gone home. But the fickle bitch had decided we were going to take the 4th exit and go back the way we'd come... back to the M5, back to our sharp left and then back to our tiny rounadabout.

At this point despair set in as we realised we were going to have to use sign posts. It turns out they're actually quite useful. Except that they only put them on every other junction and you sort of have to guess the rest. Infinitely more useful than that godforesaken sat nav of treacherous doom though. Argh.

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