Everything I learned in life came from 80’s cartoons: Don’t trust your GPS

Yesterday was a long and hard day. I had to leave just after song service from church because one of my Youth was in a pretty bad accident. She normally comes to church on Sunday, unlike 90% of my Youth, and was there but left part of the way through song service. I’ve been working the sound board lately so I saw her leave but couldn’t catch her to see what was up. I did feel it was important to pray for her so I did. She got called in to work and was on her way home for her clothes when she lost control of her car on some loose gravel spun out into a ditch and flipped the car onto its side. The side of the car was pretty torn up but the impact didn’t even crack a window or set off the airbags so that much is good. Also she didn’t have so much as a scratch on her. She was very shaken up about the whole thing because she got that she could have died right then and there. Not quite 18 and faced her own mortality. I pray she gets it now.

It is interesting how much happens after or even because of accidents in 80s cartoons. Two of my favorite cartoons basically start because of an accident. In the original Transformers they came over in the Ark which crash-lands on Earth millions of years in the past and in Thundercats their space ship crashed stranding them on an uncharted planet. Personally I would blame the navigation system.

I have a GPS and most of the time it is a wonderful thing, but I don’t trust it. I find that I have the urge to turn when it says even if there is a red light. I have also experienced bad directions more than once. The GPS has tried taking me to the wrong side of town for a few addresses. Fortunately I don’t trust the GPS and try to always have directions so when the GPS is telling me to take one route I can ignore it and go the right way instead of crash-landing on an alien planet.

A couple weeks ago we went on a ski trip, and Maggie (a Magellan GPS) plotted the trip and took us over a rather large mountain through parts of West Virginia that I’d rather never visit again. Scary, deep country places that tourists don’t want to know about. After we got to the place I asked the leader of one of the other groups what route they took and it was not the directions I followed. On the way back I figured I’d give Maggie another chance and apparently all of our mocking convinced her to take us a different route. Actually she took us the exact route that the other leader recommended. It seems odd to me that I picked all the same settings but got two different routes.

If I had remembered my lessons from 80s cartoons I would have checked on this before we left and never trusted the machine. Pretty much everything else has taught me that machines are trying to take over the world after all. The only reason we got out alive was I didn’t stop to ask for directions. “I see your lips moving but all I hear is banjo music.”

PS sorry for the late post, I didn’t get this submitted like I thought.