GPS

What a rainy, chilly day! Tennisfiend treated me to an early  birthday present. What a sweet gesture! We went to Best Buy and he picked up a GPS for our trip to Boston!  The staff was moderately helpful, but it was one of those   times when I felt acutely aware of being a consumer. The tired and hassled young clerk made every effort to be cordial and patient, answering questions he must have responded to hundreds of times before. I could sense the drudgery below a smile that seemed slightly forced. After our long discussion,  the GPS we selected was not in stock. I thought that the clerk was going to bang his head on the glass display case since it took us so long to select this model but we actually chose a second one quickly. The whole process worked very well for us since the second GPS was the same price and had better features.

We used my new toy to drive home and discovered that we can select the voice that gives driving directions. It's probably sexist of me, but I chose the male Don Pardo voice over the soothing female phone operator voice. "It's Saturrdayy Niiiight Liiiive!!!" all the way home. The best thing we discovered was that the GPS recalculates your route instantly if you get off track. This is probably a no-brainer for the technically savvy, but I can imagine myself in Boston making 100 wrong turns, waiting for the damn thing to tell me the right way to go and winding up in Georgia as a consequence. 

Let me share a funny moment--Tennisfiend made a rapid succession of turns to test the device. It responded with a succession of "route recalculation" announcements, each interrupting the previous announcement, giving the device the appearance  of stammering anxiousness. Tennisfiend found this to be humorous said "Hold on, little guy!" in such an encouraging and endearing way. I laughed all the way home.