“You need a walking stick.” Well, possibly in the not too far distant future, but I wasn’t planning on using one yet. We were waiting for the egg-on-a-stick to cook. This is a man-thing… a gadget… I was being accorded the high privilege of experiencing the phenomenon for myself. The thing looks like a Thermos flask with a hole in the middle. Two eggs and a skewer are placed inside. Several minutes later, they rise majestically out of the narrow hole, looking something like a fried egg lollipop. Or at least that’s what they look like in polite company. I could have drawn other analogies. My son and his friends are bidding fair, in their adoration of this gadget, to double the cholesterol levels of the nation singlehandedly. But it’s just a fried egg… I could have made them and done the dishes by the time it was ready. But, I was informed, that wouldn’t be egg-on-a-stick…
“Why a walking stick?” I asked.
“To shake…”
Ah. It all made sense. I’d had the hump all morning. Ever since he’d mentioned sat-nav. I’d just been writing about editing software, you see, and the sat-nav was the final straw that broke the back of the reactionary camel.
“It can plan a route avoiding main roads,” he had said.
“So can I. With a map.”
“It can take you the scenic route… show you points of interest…”
“So can I. With a map.” I wasn’t going to win. The map doesn’t give you directions as you drive, nor does it function as an odometer. Nor is a mother ever as cool as a gadget. Even so. I was going to argue my corner.
I don’t care for sat-nav on the whole. Its only possible benefit, as far as I am concerned, is to find the actual address you are heading for in a strange town. Personally, I’ve always used a map for that too, but my son had installed his phone as a sat-nav on my dashboard to get us where we were going in London recently and it did confirm the last hundred yards of the sixty mile route… you know, the one I had memorised before leaving home.
At least that time the sat-nav hadn’t sent me down a one-way street the wrong way or insisted I try driving down a road blocked by concrete posts. Or ordered me to turn across three lanes of traffic now. Granted, that had been ten years ago and the technology has improved immeasurably since then. Even so. I admit to prejudice. I like maps. You know where you are with a map.
Quite apart from the fact that perusing a map gives a wider picture and you get to see, quite clearly, everything else that is in the vicinity, I have issues with taking my eyes off the road to attempt to focus on a tiny, flashing screen on the dashboard. And it is no use asking me to listen to the directions. I argue with the thing. Or answer it back. Call it names. Or tell it a much better route. Or, more usually, just tell it to shut the hell up or risk being thrown through the window.
I have a wider issue too, with so much of the technology we have come up with that is supposed to help us, yet appears, insidiously, to be robbing us of many skills and much knowledge. How many people actually pick up a pen and write a letter? In fact, how many pick up a phone instead of sending an email? What happened to social interaction when people spend their entire day enslaved by a cell phone that runs out of signal or battery the moment you actually need it to work? And speaking of phones… have you checked your memory lately? No, not the RAM in the gadget, but your own Randomly Accurate Memory… the one that used to know dozens of phone numbers, addresses and birthdays off by heart?
I have to say mea culpa. I love technology. I use it, even rely on it, at least as much as most people. But not at the expense of thought. Use it or lose it… that slogan works where the mind is concerned. The more we challenge the mind, the better hope we have of keeping it sharp as we grow older. The irony, of course, is that in order to combat the possible loss of function we might be prey to with the plethora of technology, what did we do? Invented brain training games… to play on our screens…
He’s right you know. I may have to get one…
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 
I, too, am a map person. I refuse to use the GPS (global positioning system – same as your sat nav). I argue with it, I know the better routes, and I laugh at the way it send people places.
I am PROUD of my map skills. The ones my daughter has – and not both my tech sons.
So the men will take them away from us? Not unless they pry the maps I carefully print out before we leave from my cold, dead hands.
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What I call the sat-nav is probably unprintable, Alicia. Nor will I forget the young friend coming to visit my son who was taken on a six hour drive by one to do a hundred miles.
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The kids have to learn somehow – that computers are extremely fast and extremely literal-minded and programmed by humans.
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And fallible. Definitely fallible.
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Glad I’m not the only one still using a map! If going on a long journey I will take a map, write down the main steps and a Satnav for when closer to the destination. Belts and braces but it all works out! Lovely irony about the brain training games on consoles…guilty as I ‘borrowed’ one form my son!
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I still don’t own a sat-nav. I’m told I can use GPS on my phone, but by the time I’ve fiddled with that I could just have easily got the map out 🙂
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My RAM is old technology
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… which must make mine antique 😉
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I prefer valuable
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Possibily a better choice 🙂
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Reblogged this on oshriradhekrishnabole.
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Reblogged this on Anita & Jaye Dawes.
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I truly hate the GPS. I just don’t understand why anyone would prefer that to a map. I was always the navigator for our family, and became a master at getting people around town when I worked at a hotel. I’ll stick with my maps…it’s fun to plan out a route. As for letter writing…such a lost art. I still have boxes of stationery…somewhere. Nice post, Sue. ❤️
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I was a white van driver for a good while… before GPS… so maps and I get along just fine 🙂
I still like writing letters. The act of pen on paper and all those hours of practice as a youngster to get decent handwriting… though that seems to have backslid a bit 😉
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I wrote a long comment which WordPress said could not be posted. I don’t know why I wasn’t sewaring or anything! I was saying I can’t use a Sat-Nav, either. I won’t repeat my comment except for the last bit which was to ask for a photo of the egg on a stick gadget. It sounds like something my OH would love to add to his collection of egg poaching equipment accumulated over the years, none of which to my mind, poaches an egg properly.
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This is somewhere between poached and fried… and very strange 🙂 Taste okay though! There are videos online of the process, Mary 😉
http://www.lakeland.co.uk/19684/Rollie
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Mary, sometimes if you leave the page and come back and try to repost your comment, it will allow it. There seems to be some bug in WordPress that occasionally makes comments fail to go through.
It’s happened to me too, but when I try again, it works. Go figure… push it once and it doesn’t work, push it once and it doesn’t work, jam the button and it works. That’s wrong–being reinforced for something you should never be reinforced for!
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🙂 Thanks, Noah!
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Great post. I agree about the lost art of writing letters. I found out first-hand the joy that a handwritten letter brings–I wrote handwritten letters to two of my friends after their tenure at the college radio station ended, and they were overjoyed to read and retain them.
Although I am not regular about this, I also write thank-you notes by hand.
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There is something really special about a letter written by hand for me, as if it carries a small part of the person who wrote it. I have many that I have kept that will, no doubt, survive longer than I.
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My son learnt a good sat nav lesson about 5 years ago. We live right next to the remaining toll road in London so we have the Tom Tom set for ‘no tolls’. Of course when he and a friend they forgot so, approaching the Severn Bridge in the way to Wales it directed them to take the M 5. Rather tan ignore the gadget they did as they were told and headed for their destination – Cardiff – via the M5 Gloucester and the A38. Ha. They even admitted the signs telling them to go Straigt on for Wales and Cardiff and ignored them.
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I know those roads… just a bit of a long way round 🙂 A bit like the visitor from Southampton to Oxford who went via sat-nav and the M25 🙂
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Ha ha! Excellent
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Keep your maps, Sue! I LOVE maps and when my husband insists on using the Garmin, I usually expand whatever map is shown so I can see what’s around the route. We’re raising kids who can’t read maps!
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They fascinate me.. I love them 🙂
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But. Rarely will a map send you on a road that leads to a washed out bridge on a road that obviously hasn’t been used in at least 100 years (given the size of the trees growing down the middle). Or, when asked for the nearest motel, send you to a huge cemetery and tell you “You have reached your destination.”
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At least if it did the last I might believe it had a sense of humour 🙂
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I couldn’t agree more with this post if I hung upside down over a piano and struck ending chords similar to Bach’s! (Even the mapquest or Google map finding tool on my computer didn’t realize, for example, that there is a two mile gap on the street which most nearly crosses ours — which just happens to contain a deep gravel pit on private land not exactly suitable for driving “through”. It puts the line for the street blithely through the whole thing… ). And about those letter thingys. T and I found each other via one phone call followed by ten months of actual letters. You can’t open an email and have a bunch of lavender fall out of it ❤ 🙂
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I rest my case, m’Lud, on both counts 🙂
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Not to mention the GPS fueled disasters in the Cascades where people have got stuck in deep snowdrifts on one lane forest roads trying to find a “short cut” to the coast. One person actually died in that scenario a few years ago.
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There have been horror stories here too, but as Olga says in the comments, real maps are getting harder to get hold of on the ground.
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I went on a holiday to Louisiana with a friend and although we had booked a car with GPS we had to change it and the second one didn’t have it. The problem being that we could not find maps anywhere as I guess everybody is used now to GPSs. So from another country and with no map. Oh joy! We eventually did find some but it was quite far along on the trip and we had to try and make do with tiny maps from the guide book…
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That is one scenario where I would excuse the use of GPS 🙂
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We bought/mail ordered some lovely maps for our next trip and since I’m supposedly going to be DRIVING over there I’m sorta kinda studying them ahead of time and tracing the correct side of the road with a pencil to program it in… 🙂 “Drive.On.This.Side.Of.Road”! “Third.Exit.Off.Roundabout.” “This.Had.Better.Not.Be.A.Dead.End.”
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🙂 You’ll do just fine 🙂
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I could start a comedy show…
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You mean…just bring a camcorder round to mine? 😉
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Just the picture of me sweating earnestly and freaking out over a simple road trip is enough to make me start laughing so I can only imagine what everyone else’s reaction would look like 🙂 I drive perfectly well over here, and at least this trip I will be familiar with how road signs look and what they’re telling me, which wasn’t the case last time.
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And T will be sat next to you with advice, no doubt too 🙂
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