As I have the navigational skills of a stoned toddler driving a blimp, I use GPS everywhere I go to make sure I don’t end up in Canada when I’m just trying to get to Olive Garden before it closes. The accuracy of GPS in my city, however, is about as reliable as Comcast customer service or the drug dealer you met in the alley behind Bubba’s Liquor and Guns. The routes my GPS has given me to my various destinations have been inefficient at best. So you want to go two miles in a city built on a grid system? Go two blocks north, four blocks south, pull a three point turn in the middle of a busy intersection and then light your car on fire. Drive your flaming car backwards through a Wendy’s drive-thru, merge onto the expressway, and then go fuck yourself. You will arrive at your destination in approximately ninety-seven minutes and three dozen curse words. Oh, and that dress makes you look fat.

You also have to have Speed Racer-like reflexes to be able to follow the directions correctly. “Turn right…..now!” Well, I’m already through the intersection in completely the wrong lane and the next street is a one-way going left, so thanks for the heads up. The amount of notice given for making turns is akin to someone showing up at my apartment while I’m still in bed and saying, “You have to officiate your boss’s white tie wedding in fifteen minutes on the other side of town and you’re fired if you don’t make at least seven people cry. And by the way, the theme is robots.”

I have also been told by my GPS to turn right into somebody’s front lawn and pull a u-turn on a divided highway, which is helpful if you enjoy the screams of an angry housewife or want to test out the full capability of your seat belts. Because of this, I like to imagine that my GPS is sentient, powered by a bored alien in a cube farm on a space station orbiting Pluto who is relishing in my slow descent into navigational madness as he demands that I drift blindfolded through a parking lot and then honk at every dog I see. I wonder if “My GPS made me do it” holds up in court. “Well, your honor, I know now that it is illegal to park on top of another car, but thus it was commanded by Siri and thus it must be.” I suppose I could learn the actual layout of my city and avoid all this hassle, but that sounds like a lot of work.