DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour     

Pardon the pun but I am a "huge’" fan of vehicle navigation systems. They’ve been around awhile and just keep getting better and better. One thing stays consistent, however, and that’s the female voice who gives you directions. I’m sure it has to be a computer-generated voice or else some poor woman is working 24/7/365 and taking enough bennies, yellow jackets and greenies to gladden a Teamster convention.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a high-end Mercedes-Benz or a low-end family sedan, the same voice is telling you to “make a legal U-turn” because you’ve no doubt taken the wrong direction and you’ve disappointed “her highness.” This is easy to do and I’ll tell you a little story.

At my 30th high school reunion in 1992 I was using a brand new Lexus LS 400 from the company’s press fleet to drive back to my beloved home town of Valparaiso, Indiana. It really wasn’t necessary to make use of the navigation system because if I didn’t know my way around a place I grew up in then I might as well be looking at a lawn-mowing business in the suburbs of Hanoi.

However, the system was new and I wanted to show my wife my technical prowess (because at that stage I didn’t have much else left to impress her with). We were going to visit some friends who lived a few miles from town and just for giggles and grins I pegged in their address in the Nav system to see if it agreed with the shortcut I always took to reach these people’s home.

It became readily apparent that the female voice I lovingly referred to as the “Nav-Bitch” didn’t concur with my routing at all! Matter-of-fact, the third time she had to recalculate the route because I was going off in a much-different direction than what she was recommending, her voice stopped working for the duration of the drive and would only recycle itself after I restarted the car and the system could reboot to “her majesty’s” former command of what she referred to as the English language.

I’m not knocking the invaluable assistance the Nav-Bitch provides just questioning her attitude when someone knows an area better than she and questions her on her accuracy in routing a vehicle to its destination. She’s gotten me out of more scrapes than I’ve ever been in (if that’s possible). I just wish she’d lighten up when it comes to normal discourse.

Thinking of her got me to recalling another voice of information. In 1984 I had a new Dodge 600 convertible (my first mid-life crisis car). It had (I believe) 18 different voice commands, like “A door is ajar,” and “Your headlights are one.” This was programmed with a man’s voice, however, and I have to say, as pleasant as the Nav-Bitch’s voice is the voice of the Vehicle Systems Blabbermouth’s voice was more commanding because being authoritatively male is was reminiscent of all those wonderful hours I spent in the principal’s office as a young lad in the Hoosier State.

However, just as I would do everything in my power to bring rage to my various principals throughout my academic career, so, too, did I mess with the head of the Blabbermouth. It was possible to do a number of things in sequence, like turning off the headlights, closing the door, putting on the emergency brake, etc.

Every time you’d do what he asked the system had him say, “Thank you.” Consequently, if I did six things in sequence he would say, “Thank you” six times. As occasionally annoying as this “A-Hole” could be it was still comforting to think you had someone watching your back while you drove through the goal posts of life.

On a separate but related matter, how many remember calling the “Time Lady” to hear her say, “At the tone, the time will be “(X. X.) and 20 seconds.” It used to be really neat to try to call her about the time we would need to put our clocks ahead or back an hour. She’d go from, “At the tone the time will be 1:59 and 50 seconds” to “At the tone the time will be 1:O’clock.” Oh, what great fun! Especially as my friend Larry Atwell and I would sit around getting buzzed on my great-grandfather’s wine he made for the Jewish Holidays. (He could make this wine so it would knock you on your ass after three sips or you could drink it for a month straight and not feel the effects.) But I digress.

I always thought of myself as a deep thinker even though I was a total buffoon with some of my thoughts. I actually thought this lady recorded a little speech with the correct time for 24 hours and wondered how fatigued she must have been by the time her project was completed. Little did I know that the various recordings of hers were probably spliced together to make a seamless recorded announcement.

So you see, it’s bad enough to have a spouse yell at you or constantly order you around. But when it gets to the point where it seems like the whole world is busting your chops it’s time to issue a pre-recorded message from one of the two middle fingers you’ve been equipped with.

No damned machine is going to rule my life, you got that, Nav-Bitch?