TomTom, You'll Be The Death Of Me

Part of my pastoral duties involve driving around a whole lot. Start at the church, head to a morning meeting at the coffee shop, go to a couple hospital visits in downtown, meet a parishioner for lunch near the church, do a couple of communion visits throughout the neighborhood, come back to the church to check messages... before you know it, I've racked up some serious mileage. One thing that helps is that the church pays the lease on a car for me. (Man, I'm at a great place.) The other thing that helps is knowing where you're going.

I'm not fabled for having a good head when it comes to directions. Sure, I can read maps - in theory. Mostly, I rely on Google Maps. But that's got a downside, too. You can plan your route out in advance, but if you path changes you're in a tough spot. Mine always changes - a meeting goes long, someone's in a different hospital, I have a few extra minutes to swing over to see someone - so I'm never headed to the right place in exactly the right order. Which means I never know how to get where I'm going.

Enter a GPS. I asked for one for Christmas, and I got two. (Thanks!) I settled on the one and have been using it ever since. And it's great. No matter where I am, I can always get home, to the church, any of those touch point things. I can change my plans in the middle of my day, and as long as I know where I'm headed I can type it into the TomTom and I'm there. I can even search for a point of interest in a city or near my location, so if I don't know exactly where something is, I can find it. Or I can see if there's a Sonic nearby or something. It's pretty awesome.

I have become reliant on my TomTom, and here's the problem: it's not always right. In fact, when I most need it to be right, it's wrong. Sometimes it's just plain dumb. For starters, that lovely point of interest function seems to be seriously lacking. I can know for sure that a certain church is in a certain town - clear cut, no question about it - and it'll say that place doesn't exist. Not a new church, not an uncharted part of town, nothing. It's just decided to ignore the place. If I have the address, I can hunt it down - but that's meant occasionally calling the church office, like an idiot, and ask for the street address.

And sometimes even the street address doesn't help. Yesterday, for instance, I was headed from a wedding to a grad party to a wedding reception. I had the addresses for everything, so I was set. I typed in the address for the grad party, only to find that TomTom claimed the address didn't exist. Unless this family had suddenly been transferred to a black hole, I knew that not to be true. I could at least get TomTom to admit that their street existed, so I asked it to take me there. I'd just drive 'til I hit the house number. I hit the street, only to find it was an alley. Actually, it was more of a driveway. And clearly, no grad party was happening.

I ended up calling Chris and having him use Google Maps to get me from the intersection I was at to the actual house address. Surprise, surprise - it did exist. And Google could get me there just fine. I was ready to chuck TomTom out my window.

There are so many things I love about TomTom. If I miss a turn, it immediately recalculates to give me a new route. It knows where I am in real-time, so I can see which streets I'm driving past - even if street signs are blocked from view. But all this assumes that TomTom knows where I'm going in the first place, which it often doesn't. At least, more often than I'd like.

I know I can go online and buy a super-awesome-updated map or something, which is theoretically better than the map it automatically comes with. It just seems stupid to buy a map for the thing when it already came with the map. And if the map it's supposed to come with is already defective, doesn't that seem manipulative? TomTom, I love you so much... why do you have to break my heart like this?