Posted on 01/16/2013 8:16:31 AM PST by posterchild
Put too much faith in technology and you may wind up in Croatia. A 67-year-old woman from Belgium learned that the hard way after she followed (faulty) directions from her GPS device.
The woman only wanted to go about 90 miles from her hometown of Hainault Erquelinnes, Belgium, to pick up a friend at the Brussels train station. Her GPS device sent her about 900 miles to the south before (during the second day of driving) she realized that something was amiss. It's unclear if she entered the address incorrectly or if the GPS was faulty.
Discovery explains that the driver, Sabine Moreau, stopped twice for gas, slept on the side of the road, and "even suffered a minor car accident" along the way. She told El Mundo that she wasn't paying attention.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
A machine is only as smart as the user.
In today's world however, this woman drives and drives, having no internal feeling that something is wrong until she is 900 miles away from her destination, and it becomes an AP story that circles the globe for a read and a good laugh..
I used a GPS one time and it betrayed me. Almost missed a buddy’s wedding. I will never use one again.
Just watched “the Avengers” this weekend. Their hover aircraft carrier was falling out of the sky and needed to get back over the ocean.
Samuel Jackson calls down to the bridge and asks for a status update and the navigator dude said the computer was down and they couldn’t get the coordinates blah blah blah. Jackson screams back tho him which direction the sun rises and to turn that way and keep it in the left window.
Pretty much sums up todays brain dead way of relying on computers instead of using common sense.
She must be a sister of Obama. Doesn’t know north from south or east from west.
I use GPS a lot - I go to unfamiliar areas all the time for work.
In some cases I’ll set it to “shortest route” to see if there’s a better route...it’ll send you through fields - off the road to rocky dirt paths - makes driving exciting :)
I will happily admit that I am Wrong-Way Corrigan. If there are two possible directions, I’ll take the wrong one. If there are three, I’ll take both wrong ones before taking the right one. However, it wouldn’t take me more than an hour to figure out I was going in the wrong direction just by the road signs. They do have road signs in Croatia, don’t they?!
We had an occasion to be attending a wedding at Pensacola Beach and directions from Nuvi was to drive out of the lot behind our B&B, turn Right for 6 blocks, Left for 4 blocks, another Left for 6 blocks, then Left again 3 1/2 blocks & turn Left onto a causeway.
In fact, GPS Nuvi had us making a rather large rectangle to take the very next Left our of our B&B parking area (1/2 block from our starting point!).
I became almost violent when hubby attempted to repeat the directions later the same day!
We are still married but..........
Just curious at what point she thought something might be wrong... on the second or third gas fill-up for this 90-mile trip?
If this isn’t the feel-good story of the year, I don’t know what is.
You simply can’t fix stupid.
I don’t buy the story. To get to Croatia from Belgium, she would have had to cross through Germany and Austria, Slovenia, and maybe even Luxembourg or Italy, and she would have had to drive over the Alps.
Don’t they have road signs in Belgium?.
One would think the reporter would verify such a fundamental fact before such a story went to print.
Considering that the woman outed herself as such a ditz, I would give good odds on the former.
I hope she took advantage of the opportunity to do some sight-seeing in Zagreb--there are some fine old buildings in the medieval section of the city, and the archaeological museum has the longest Etruscan inscription in existence (the Zagreb mummy wrapping).
In times past Belgium and Croatia had common rulers--the Habsburgs (Belgium for a long time was known as the Austrian Netherlands).
Sad to admit it, but this woman driver can relate. I am definitely of above-average intelligence, I am very co-ordinated, and I am very organized, but I have no sense of direction. That part of my brain — along with the part that is supposed to do math — is just not developed. I even get lost in buildings unless I take the time to memorize the way out
Before GPS, I spent a lot time getting lost. The dear husband, on the other hand, can visualize any place from which I call him and tell me exactly how to get home. Fortunately, I don’t have to make those calls these days, thanks to the GPS in my car. The husband is just baffled by my affliction.
I had one of those exciting trips towing an 18’ trailer on what was basically a logging road. I’m always up for an excursion off the 4 lanes.
...I don’t automatically believe any directions from Google or a GPS, always actually look at the map path to see if it makes sense, and usually tweak it because they take roads I avoid.
***
That’s what my husband does. He has lots of paper maps and uses them along with the electronic helps. For me a map might as well be in Greek.
She was pining for the fjords?
I went on a tour of the Bankhead tunnel in Mobile last year, and in the control room, they explained that they had many accidents involving trucks or RV’s hitting the low clearance entrance. Most of these accidents, they explained, were the result of people following GPS(even after passing signs telling them they couldn’t fit and going through warning chains set to brush the tops of vehicles too tall to go through). Right after the guide said that, the camera monitoring the entrance showed a U-Haul was backing out after a near miss. Thinking about this, I realize that a lot of the people who would be on a route taking them through the Bankhead Tunnel would be locals who should know better.
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