Travelling disoriented dominatrix style
Monday, March 22nd, 2010My brother has a cellphone plan with contract so when he was told that he could pick out a new phone for free, he decided to get 1 with GPS in it to make our travelling easier. The battery of my PDA is death and I currently can’t affort to buy a new one so until now we’ve been printing out directions from Google maps whenever we had to go somewhere new. They work well but it’s not very enviromental and wallet friendly.
So yesterday we went to visit one of my best friends who lives half a hour, by car, away. I gave him the address and drove off, expecting it to work well enough since he had already succesfully tried it out while walking. Boy, where we wrong…
Getting a signal was really easy since it uses the signal from telephone poles for positioning until it locks on to satellites. We were even pleasantly surprise to hear spoken instructions since it’s a free application but the voice really made us both laugh since it really sounds like, what I imagine, a dominatrix.
I’ve always used Tomtom so I’m used to it saying stuff like : “Turn left now” but the way the female voice says it really makes you want to stand up straight and say : “Yes Ma’am”. This description may make you think that she sounds more like a drill sergeant but for some reason dominatrix popped in our heads. 
The instructions were clear enough but she seemed to be having a lot of trouble with staying on track. It already started when I was at the first traffic light. She said to turn right at the point where I still had to go left past the traffic lights. We figured it was because it didn’t have 4 satellites yet and shrugged it off but that was only the beginning…
The first part was easy since I only had to get on the highway, something I know like the back of my hand. By that time the program had 6 satellites so that should normally be plenty.
Yesterday was a nice and sunny Sunday afternoon so we weren’t the only ones on the highway. Lots of people went to the Rotterdam Zoo (Blijdorp) and the highway was really busy. Once we got past that exit, it wasn’t as busy anymore and it was time to start paying attention to the dominatrix. I wont describe everything she said but I’d say that the positioning is really off when she tells you to turn around on a highway because she thinks you’re 5 km (3 miles) further ahead. Not mentioning on time which exit you’re supposed to take because she doesn’t know where she is, is really inconvenient too…
We ended up arriving in “only” double the time it was supposed to take because my brother ended up switching to map mode and gave me directions from there.
It ended up being a fun afternoon but it’s the last time I’m taking instructions from that disoriented dominatrix…
I haven’t had any response yet on my dog walking service but I haven’t put flyers everywhere yet so I’m still a bit hopefull. I’ve been sick last week and had a infected eye (which is still red) so I’ve had to take it easy. I actually still feel a bit feverish so I’m skipping fitness today. My friend can’t make it today anyway so I don’t feel to bad about it.
The new rats have been doing great by the way and when I put my arm in the cage, they’ll actually use it to walk straight out of it and on my shoulder.
Popularity: 10%
