GPS Story

A friend of mine recently used his GPS to go from our office in the Financial District to the Caltrain station. Instead of walking down Sansome to Market to Powell to 4th and King, my poor buddy ended up following the GPS directions (in the voice of a British lady) on his HDC Windows Mobile device, which navigated him through the one-way streets to criss-cross SOMA as though he were on car. What should have taken about 25 minutes walk ended up taking 40. Thankfully the train during rush hour runs frequently, and he wasn’t too delayed.Sometimes low-fi technology like a map and real people is still the best. We all had a good laugh about it afterwards, particularly as he was so proud of the device and its GPS capabilities. We all decided that we’d trade the British lady accent for the ability to be able to tell the GPS that we were on foot v. driving in car.An update: My buddy found the option to let the GPS navigate for him via foot after a little digging.  We had another good laugh about it.