GPS: Going places slowly

My new car has all of those fancy extras designed to keep me from killing someone while driving.

It has a thing that beeps when someone’s in my blind spot; it has a back-up camera that will beep and hit the brakes if I’m about to back into something. When it’s in cruise control, it will automatically slow down if the car in front of me is going slower than I am. I still have to yell at that driver and give him a hand gesture when I pass him, but someday, cars will do that automatically, too.

Let’s face it: This car practically drives itself.

Hearing about these features, some people say, “Well, what about that guy who was killed in the self-driving car?” You probably heard about that. The guy was watching a movie when his car slammed into a truck. What none of the reporters bothered to mention was that about 300 people died that very same day in non-self-driving cars.

See, that’s not news because it happens every day. Feel safer now?

The older I get, the harder it is to sit in the driver’s seat and turn my neck all the way around to check my blind spot. Sometimes it hurts even more to turn it back to face front again. The new car not only beeps if there’s a car (or more often, an 18-wheeler) beside me, but a light goes on in the rearview mirror to warn me not to change lanes. It’s fantastic. I no longer fear being crushed to death by a truck that’s bigger than my house. Every time I’m near a big rig, I think of that chariot race in “Ben-Hur.” I can just see the lug nuts of a semi ripping into the side of my car.

Yes, the new car makes me feel much safer. What I still fear, however, is being lost forever in a mall parking lot thanks to my new dashboard GPS.

Like everyone else, I have my horror stories of being misled by the map on my cellphone. It’s bad enough to whiz past the place you wanted to go at 65 mph; I don’t want to reset my GPS in the middle of an interstate exchange. The difference is not just going north or south or east or west, but often, a choice between life and death. I don’t mind dying, just not today, thank you very much. And not because GPS HQ didn’t know this road was closed for repairs.

But now I have joined the modern world: The GPS is right on the dashboard. No juggling a phone, no more eyes off the road. The day after Black Friday (Purple Saturday, I guess?), I took the GPS for a test run to Tootin’ Commons, the giant mall half a state away. Over the years, other malls have attached themselves to the main mall with newer stores and restaurants, but their parking lots all overlap -- a cluster of one-way streets, limited access roads, delivery alleys ... you get the picture. It’s one of those places where you can get lost in the parking lot.

Am I in the Applebee’s lot or the Pizzeria Uno lot or the Barnes and Noble lot? How do you get from one to the other? They’re all connected, but not where you would think, and the store I really want to visit is across the interstate. I know that because I can see the sign from where I am now.

I have no idea how to get there from here. The GPS has a little blue arrow pointing up, but when I drive that way, it says make a U-turn. What? There are no signs in this mall parking lot that will tell you how to get to the other one, because that would be bad for business. As if making customers crazy is good for business.

All I could think was, “Online shopping! Online shopping!” Let the UPS guy worry about the GPS.

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Contact Jim Mullen at [email protected].