A couple years ago, I gave my wife a GPS for her birthday. We quickly switched it over to the British voice and named her Diana.
Though Diana has proven to be extremely helpful in terms of navigation, I have an excellent sense of direction and can usually find my way around, so the benefits to me in this regard have been minimal.
This is never the case for Elysha. Once she leaves her hometown, her internal map is at times almost nonexistent. Thanks to Diana she can get around without having to write down directions before leaving the house. For me, it’s meant that I don’t worry nearly as much as I once did when she is driving.
Nevertheless, the GPS has made one significant difference in the way that I drive. One of the features on the GPS is an estimated arrival time, and it is remarkably accurate. What I’ve come to realize through this feature is that speeding is pointless. Even on a two hour excursion, accelerating from 65 to 80 miles per hour for the highway portion of the trip doesn’t improve your arrival time significantly enough to make it worth the chance of a speeding ticket.
In many cases, it makes little difference at all.
This fact has become so evident to me that I think GPS should be required in every teenager’s car, as a means of slowing them the hell down.
Of course, a GPS probably wouldn’t have stopped me and Danny Pollock from getting my Datsun B210 up to 100 MPH on Elm Street just for kicks, and it would have done little to thwart my games of mailbox baseball and the subsequent breaking of my wrist.
And it have done little to prevent the accident that nearly killed me, and it couldn’t have saved the No Parking sign outside St. Paul’s Church or the Stop sign on the grounds of Blackstone Millville Regional High School or the door of the PhotoMat hut in the Almacs’ parking lot
But I did a fair bit of speeding back when I was a teenager, and I received a multitude of tickets in response. Like many teenage boys, I was reckless and dangerous and should not have been given a license until I was twenty-one, but short of keeping me off the road, a GPS might have slowed me down a bit.
And it might have prevented the accident that totaled my Corolla and kept me and some friends from attending a Yankee’s game a few years ago.
It’s a miracle that I’m still alive.
