As I began my trip back to Minnesota to surprise my Mother for Mother’s Day I started thinking about how completely lost I would be if I didn’t have some sort of GPS system that I use to get from one place to another. Now, I am not from the St. Louis area so once I get too far from where I live in St. Louis things get a little fuzzy for me. Once I find myself in a place I don’t recognize I usually put my GPS out to save me from what could be a very frustrating guessing game for myself. I thank my parent’s for giving me this little gadget because without it I would surely get lost all the time. But gadgets can only do so much and sometimes I wonder where that thing is really taking me. Does it really give you the shortest route to your destination? Or does it just take the road most traveled and unfortunately you are stuck in tons of traffic wondering if there is another way?

I was found wondering this when I was on my way back to Minnesota on Thursday afternoon. I did everything like I normally do when I am going back there but this time it was a little different. The GPS wanted to go a way that I have never gone to get back to Minnesota. So instead of listening to the directions that I was being given I took the way that I normally go. For some reason I spent about a half hour fighting this gadget from rerouting me back to the original directions that it had given me. I wanted to throw it out the window a few times, I won’t lie about that. But then it was telling me to get off of the main highway and to take all these odd little side roads and I found myself get again asking it out loud “Why?” I had never gone this way so why was it taking me that way now? It was all strange to me and I asked myself how does it choose which way it takes me, and why does it seem the change that route to something different every time that I go back to Minnesota? I guess I may never know the true answer to that, or maybe with a little research I may find some answers to all those questions that I asked that day.

So now I ask you, do you have a similar experience with a little gadget that you cannot live without? Tell us about it!

Written by: Wendy Doherty

Why the hell is everything so far from everything else? I mean if I leave my house in the morning it takes me the better part of the morning to get to school, or almost everything else. When did cities begin to get so spaced out that it takes forever to get anywhere? The only thing that being so spread out gives us is the companies that make GPS units. I wonder if it started when inner cities became so congested and dingy or if it started when consumerism really went nuts in the early nineties. Maybe instead of building new neighborhoods in the middle of nowhere, we should move back into the cities and repair the old building? But with oil prices going up who knows maybe the cities will repopulate.

By – Will Stoeber