Here’s the Online column from January 14
It pays to take all this technology guff with a grain of salt, doesn’t it?
Between the news stories out of the United States about people relying so much on the whizz-bang GPS systems in their cars that they forget all common sense and all the wee Google Map glitches here in the south you could be forgiven for thinking you’d be better off relying on a pirate treasure map to find your way around.
GPS might find the quickest route from point A to point B but it simply isn’t able to look at the weather and say: “you know what folks? All this snow is likely to make that infrequently used piece of road unusable”.
It’s also only as good as the least attentive person involved in its design, production and programming. Perhaps the person responsible for entering the information on the train tracks was having an off day, or the person in charge of roads leading to nowhere was busy updating their Facebook status.
Unfortunately, common sense is often in short supply. Here’s a hint: if there’s no road ahead, stop driving.
Google’s mapping issues seem to be reasonably widespread here in the south. An Alexandra pizza shop has been misplaced and here in good old Invercargill, Esk St has been rearranged in a spectacular fashion.
I wonder if I can use that as an excuse for being late for work? Sorry Fred, Google Maps said turn right and I ended up in the menswear shop. No offence to Barkers, but I suspect I’d find it difficult to fill in my day. If the mis-mapping directed me to a nice comfy pub, I might give that excuse a go.
Perhaps we should form a committee and get together with a street map, some sticky notes and marker pens and put together something to help the Google gurus find their way around the south. It’s really not that difficult now, is it?
Actually, being on the wrong side of the street is pretty minor compared with being located on the wrong side of the Atlantic, as Business Week reporter Rich Jaroslovsky found when his New York location was mistaken for London.
However, an intrepid pigeon in Los Angeles has had no difficulty in tracking Google. It seems the feathered critter decided to leave a deposit on a Google Street View camera. And all without the help of GPS.