The last few weeks I have been going out quite a lot with my tom tom. I found her (the voice is programmed as female) a great passenger: she never criticizes my driving ability and never complains if I question or overrule her navigational advice. Eventually I decided to take her on holiday with me: always a testing time for a new relationship, especially when it involves being cooped up together in a car for an eighteen hour drive. I learned a lot more about her temperament. Turns out she's a bit bipolar (yeah - I have a bit of history in that respect). Either she wants to go the fastest route or else she takes down the smallest roads imaginable. I had a hint at this side of her when we went to London together and when I turned off the motorway to avoid a long tailback she responded by taking us up some narrow twisty lanes that I never knew existed (although we were some 20KM from where I had grown up).
After twelve hours on the motorway to the south of France I decided I wanted a break on some A-roads (Routes Nationales) and she tried to take me along the most direct route which, on more than one occasion involved going up or down steep, dusty, lanes into what looked like people's backyards. Still we made it all the way to Aix-en-Provence without an argument- but once there my temper got frayed. I had some paintings to deliver to a gallery in the heart of the old city. Unbeknown to me there is just one access road for cars to that quarter. That Saturday it was closed for filming. All day. Every time I was diverted by the police and road blocks the tom tom, politely but insistently, tried to send me back the same way. I went to the same road block three times. Eventually the police explained that the road was the only access road and advised me to return after after 12. I tried again at 3 and the road was again closed. Eventually I returned at 6.30 and got to my destination- only to find out that the people at the gallery hadn't been told by their office (whom I had spoken to the previous week) to expect a delivery. So I was parked in a street wide enough for two horses, trying to resolve this problem in French while my parked car bought the entire centre of Aix to a a halt. The French - being French - were not slow to express their displeasure at having their streets blocked by a Dutch van. It was as if France had won the World cup (fat chance...). Eventually I resolved the problem and got my ass out of there but didn't want to speak to my tom tom for three days afterwards. Next week (this week now) I have a human passenger sharing my car for a week - I wonder whether the navigation will go as smoothly.
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2 comments:
She's just really pigheaded, just as my Tom Tom, who once sent us through the scariest, wrinkliest paths in the Pyrenees to get to Andorra, making me carsick for 3 hours.
In fact, these kind of roads have no speedlimit (at least not in the memory of Tom Tom), so they calculate it at 90 or 130km/hour while in reality you go very very slow...
stephanie
Good story, I share your assessment of Tom Tom, and I also use the female British voice. I do sense disappointment when I refuse to Turn Around When Possible, accompanied by frenzied recalculation as I insist on going ahead even as she keeps pointing back. I've been guided through my share of fields, vinyards, alleys, and cowpaths in search of the chimeral Shortest Route, never the fastest but often the more interesting.
Once, deciding that the shrtest route was through a tiny village rather than around it, she got me virtually wedged into a narrow street running beneath a clocktower. A second grade teacher brought her class over to direct mo out from beneath the arch: no English, but she laughed and pointed, saying Tom Tom, tapping her forehead. I guess I wasn't the first who had taken that route.
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