GPS - again
 

So I took a nice ride on my horse this afternoon and came home by way of a stretch of the county road. I saw dust way up ahead so I got us off over in the ditch but the vehicle never appeared. Then the road enters a patch of trees so I had to get back on the road. Shortly I see a Tundra sitting at no particular place in the road with some old guy in it. I asked him what he was looking for and he said "Windsong" road and I said you just passed it down there by that bunch of mailboxes. Didn't you see the sign?

He said yeah, but my GPS said that wasn't it so I kept driving (really? :rolleyes: )

I told him to turn that dang thing off before it leads you up some two track up over a mountain :lol:


So apparently city folks will believe their gizmo thingie instead of what they can see with their own eyes. I guess the road must really be hidden somewhere in that dense patch of timber instead of down there by the green county road sign beside that long gravel strip leading off to the west.

Re: GPS - again
 

People put way too much faith in this electronic world we are being (attempted to being) shoehorned into. I'd rather screw up all on my own. Up home near my mom's the road takes a sharp turn but you can go straight on someone's lane. The county had to make a sign that is posted there that says "US40" with an arrow pointing left with the curve. Below that it says "Your GPS is wrong". This is a permanent sign.

Different, but electronic. I picked up $960 of lumber at the lumber yard a couple weeks ago. Debit card was declined, tried again and it was declined. So I wrote a check. I get home and call my bank to see what was happening and I'm told both of my purchases went though. SAY WHAT??? And I wrote a check, too! So thanks to this wonderful perfectly flawless system we rely on I just paid $2,880 for $960 of material!!

Re: GPS - again
 

I don't know if the mapping is wrong or the signal is messed up. I rather think the mapping is wrong.

Gps could be useful if you put it on satellite view so you see the actual roads and trails and then your location. But then you would have to have a working brain, just like with a map.

Re: GPS - again
 

I depend on mine for work. and yes its wrong occasionally. But i dont think there are any other choices. do they still make paper maps? And many of my customers are on new roads that won't show up anywhere else.

Re: GPS - again
 

They still made the DeLorme topo maps a couple years ago when we bought out last ones.

Out here where I live, the GPS is always wrong. Either it has things in the wrong places or it suggests you drive some route that basically doesn't exist: goat trails or private roads that are gated off.

I just get tired of either waiting on somebody because they refused to take or follow my directions instead of their GPS, or else having to tell lost people where to go, especially when they drove right by the road sign for the road that they were looking for.

Re: GPS - again
 

GPS has tried to put me several hundred feet out in the Chesapeake Bay on one occasion while over in Southern MD. I love my ADC map books but sometimes they are just not practical.

Re: GPS - again
 

Just think if you were in a boat out in the Bay and using your GPS plotter to keep yourself off the shore and the rocks.

Re: GPS - again
 

Apparently GPS locations are only as good as the ones who input them in the system. Our lumber yard has been shown to be in an empty field about 400 yards east of where it actually is. It sits off the road a couple hundred yards too so everybody misses it. Most truckers use GPS to get them to their destinations and sometimes it's just wrong. I can't tell you how many times over the past 28 years I've had drivers call me and tell me they were at our location and we weren't there. We've had two of our techy guys try to correct our issue with GPS, google maps and what ever but they were unsuccessful.

Re: GPS - again
 

When I was doing home improvements under another company I kept the ADC map book for each county. I never had a problem finding an address.

http://www.adcmap.com/

The company I ordered seamless gutter for delivery from used those books. They would copy each page of the route with the route clearly marked with a fat magic marker. That worked flawlessly. They would not schedule a delivery without the address. "It's the first house, blue with white shutters, on the right at the stop sign with the red '55 Chevy in front of the garage" wasn't good enough. He just wanted the address and he would find that job using the map book. I'm pretty sure that is how all my siding deliveries were carried out as well. I never had a driver not be able to find the job and never had one late and lost. Before GPS I was unaware of any problems with finding a location I needed to find. I feel you gain a convenience and you lose a skill. Now you see people using these new technologies talking like they are a necessity. I guess I'm right.

Re: GPS - again
 

In the rare event of someone visiting us who doesn't already know where we are, I give very detailed and specific directions. I tell them about every fork in the road that might possibly be confusing, what it looks like and which way to go. A lot of times the road signs are nonexistent either from being knocked down or stolen. Then some people will arrive much later than expected, and say "oh, but I followed the GPS directions instead and danged if I didn't end up on a dead in road in somebody's yard where there was a big hairy guy with a shotgun" :lol:

Re: GPS - again
 

Did the trucker drive right past your place to find the empty field? :rolleyes: :lol:

Re: GPS - again
 

Yessir. A bunch of them did. I had one guy drive back and forth in front of our yard 6 times and never saw our sign. I finally got in my truck and followed him to that empty field. One poor guy just could not find us and after 6 or 7 calls I finally told him to call his dispatcher, it was obvious I could not help him.

You wonder how some of them even left the terminal.

Re: GPS - again
 

Don't get me started on those things. My first experience was when we went to my eldest son's graduation from Air Force Basic Training. The hotel we were supposed to stay at, the GPS told us the offramp before the one were supposed to exit. After a few turnings-around, the wife finally called the hotel...which was one offramp further. I'm especially appreciative of the part where the stupid thing tells you, "Turn left in 40 feet" when you're driving at any kind of speed...not. I have a friend who has used the GPS in some travel finder, and would have ended up driving down a steep embankment or into a cornfield. He's a smart cookie- he didn't do those things! :lol:

Re: GPS - again
 

For a handful of years me, my friend John and one or two others would go to an off road race another friend ran his '69 Blazer in up in the PA mountains. The first time I got directions off the computer and wrote them down. We found the place just fine. The next year John was all worried when I told him I didn't bring directions. I told him now I know where it is. Every turn he would doubt me, suggest we try the other way, and I even had to let him take a wrong way just to see he was wrong. But we rolled right in to the same entrance on the same road near the same town. He was less nervous the third year and we went straight to it. Now John and his friends live in the suburbs of the city and they do things differently.
After going several years, always finding it because I remembered the route and all the landmarks, he brings a friend with his GPS. I'd tell John we need to take the next right and this guy would say "My GPS says we can take...". I said right there "Either we are going by my directions or we use that GPS. But if we use that GPS I can be no help". Well, they wanted to use the GPS and I had no idea where we were going. We get all screwed up and they would ask me. "I have no idea where we are. Never been here". I told them if they want my help we would have to find our way back to where we started using the GPS or find someone to ask directions. We saw someone and I asked directions. That got us back on a road I knew and we found the place. I think that guy was playing with his GPS the whole time trying to suggest other ways to go but I ignored him.
Going home and on the interstate he counted my directions with that gizmo and it had us taking the long way around Harrisburg when my turn had us skirt by the whole city.

It was country rural logic vs suburban gadget dependency