My Global Positioning Serpent

On the drive back from taking my daughter to summer camp, the assured, honeyed voice of my GPS guide told me to take the next right off the highway. It was onto Skunk Hollow Road, which I didn't remember encountering on the way to camp and whose name didn't inspire a desire to linger. But who was I to doubt my GPS lady when she rang her double-toned, time-to-turn signal? So I turned. Then she told me to turn again, and again, and soon I was bumping along unpaved road.

I was now convinced that my GPS lady was a cross between Lady Macbeth (". . . look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't") and HAL 9000, the homicidal computer from "2001: A Space Odyssey." There seemed to be a malign purpose to her misdirection. Every time she sent me into a blind alley, or insisted I take a highway exit that sent me only further from my destination, I imagined her at some GPS cocktail party gleefully telling her male counterpart (named Iago) just how far from home she had managed to get me.

I had such hopes for my GPS. I'm a technophobe, but this seemed like a breakthrough that promised only upside -- like one of those lunchtime face-lifts. But after six months of adventures with my frenemy from Magellan, I know the sweet delights of technology's rescu and the cruelty of its betrayal.

I have no sense of direction. A boyfriend once said that I made Hansel and Gretel look like Lewis and Clark. I have done some of my best sightseeing while trying to get somewhere else. One day, trying to meet a friend at a community pool, I ended up in the driveway of the CIA. Another time, dropping a friend off at Reagan National Airport, I took us on a tour of the Pentagon's parking lots. My disability is a family legacy. My father, while driving with my mother, told her once to find something on the map. "It's north," he said. She looked at him, baffled, pointed her finger skyward and said, "I thought 'up' was north."

Mapquest and Googlemaps changed my life -- no longer did I have to simultaneously read a map and drive. But I hated having to hold a page of directions with one hand and maneuver with the other. And if something came up -- new construction, a highway accident -- I was helpless to find an alternative route.

We inaugurated our Magellan GPS on a family trip to Ikea. We were a little wary when the voice told us to take a left into a residential area -- but we rationalized that this must be some fabulous shortcut known only to those with a friend attached to the dashboard by suction cup. After 10 minutes of twists and turns deeper into the neighborhood, we ended up on a street where our path was blocked by a couch (not from Ikea) with a sign propped on it announcing, "You Can't Drive Through Here!" We realized the residents, sick of their quiet streets being turned into a NASCAR track by bargain furniture shoppers misled by GPS, had done their own public works modification.

On many trips, bizarre suggestions followed. Now, every time I use the GPS, I back it up with multiple printed directions (causing me even more highway anxiety when they inevitably conflict). Recently my husband and I drove from Maryland to New Jersey. The printed directions sensibly suggested we take the New Jersey Turnpike. But our lady kept objecting. My husband said, "She's telling us to get off, she must know a better way." Like Jenny Sanford, I insisted he was just falling into her trap, and like Mark Sanford, he couldn't resist. Our detour through Pennington, Flemington and other New Jersey boroughs did almost as much for our marriage as the governor's trip to Buenos Aires did for his.

But nobody I know has been more victimized by GPS than my in-laws. They live on a suburban Maryland cul-de-sac that GPS apparently thinks is a cut-through to a main road. They have gotten used to the round-the-clock sound of confused motorists spinning tires onto their gravel driveway. One night at 4 a.m., a driver found he had literally reached the end of the road in their back yard. This so unhinged him that he set his car on fire -- the explosion woke up my in-laws -- and ran off looking for the highway. When the police picked him up a few hours later, he said that when he realized the GPS had sent him to this dead end, he lost it. Sure, there were also some preexisting mental health issues, but I can understand that when Lady MacGPS sends you astray, it feels like being lost on the Scottish moor, awaiting the crack of doom.

Emily Yoffe is a contributing writer to Slate.com. Her e-mail address is emilyyoffe@hotmail.com.