GPS Jerks

Ah, the land of blogs. Safe haven for rants of all kinds. I recently discovered a new pet peeve of mine and now it's my turn...

You know what really turns my crank? When people borrow someone's GPS unit and they change the owner's chosen settings for it. Sometimes it's only changing the volume or day/night displays, which is fine in general. Sometimes it's changing the interface to add or remove certain statistics or displays, and that's tricky to reset. Sometimes, people reset the "Home" link and that just seems selfish and unnecessary.

However, there's one more thing that GPS users just love to customize: The voice.

Different GPS units treat this aspect differently. On some units, it involves the language feature and it lets you select the local dialect. On other units, the voice options are controlled by fun personalities with cute little names. Regardless, people love to get in there and flip back and forth between a bunch of settings until they find one they prefer or one that amuses them in some way.

And when the owner gets their GPS unit back and continues to use it as usual, the instructions come out in different way. Changing from a female voice to a male voice is the most drastic change. However, the vocabulary used by a British setting and an American setting can vary quite a bit as well. It's freakin' annoying! And now the owner has to find that long-forgotten setting and feature that their friend messed with and they have to remmeber how to reset it.

Sure, we may be anthropomorphizing the GPS a bit, giving it a name and treating it like a person. Nothing wrong with that, is there? People give their cars names and they treat their pets that way. I've had hilarious conversations with other guys as we mock the GPS personality as if it's really thinking. As long as we don't start to have deep emotional discussions with this little computer then we'll be fine, we can just stick to getting ticked off as it gives us confusing directions yet again.

So, my pet peeve is that people change the settings on a GPS unit that they borrow from someone else. Your friend was kind enough to lend you this expensive piece of hardware, so why are you annoying them by changing all of their settings? It's like borrowing someone's car and changing the pre-set radio stations. It's like borrowing someone's iPod and messing with their folders and play lists.

I say that it's rude and disrespectful. Back in the day, not removing your hat when speaking to someone was offensive. These days, we have new unwritten rules of etiquette that have evolved to match our technology. Well, this used to be an unwritten rule but I guess it's not anymore. So take that, GPS Jerks!