Advice check ... Many GPS users will have an "oops" story to tell. Photo: Craig Sillitoe
"Karen" is lying to you.
Perhaps lying is too strong a word; Karen just isn't taking a direct approach.
Follow her advice, and where does it get you? Stuck on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
Karen isn't real, of course, she's just a pre-recorded voice on a Global Positioning System unit.
But a surprising number of people check their common sense at the car door when they turn on their units and drive away.
"People have become over-reliant on the units and in some cases, misunderstand the rules of use," says psychologist Colin Ellard, author of the book, YOU ARE HERE: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon But Get Lost in the Mall.
Almost anyone who has used a GPS unit - be it Garmin, Magellan, TomTom, portable or built into a car's dash - has an "oops" story to tell.
GPS can be a godsend on the family trip up the coast but from time to time can also provide inexplicably awful directions.
"I don't think there is a big learning curve. It's more often a matter of people putting blind faith into a device without doing some very, very basic double-checking," says Tim Flight, founder of the GPSReview.net website, which rates units and provides consumer forums and trend news.
"Even today when I put an address into a GPS and hit 'OK,' I still check the review function to say 'yeah, this looks reasonable."'
"It's near nothing," says Flight, who appreciates accurate directions while driving a snowy, mountainous landscape.
Recent events in the US would support his concern.
In Oregon, there were at least three incidents of motorists stranded in the drifts, most notably that of Jeramie Griffin, his companion, Megan Garrison, and their toddler.
The family, using a portable GPS Griffin received as a Christmas present, tried a "shortcut" across the Cascade Range and got stuck on a snowy local road for 24 hours before being rescued.
They carried no paper maps in the car, and their mobile phones were out of signal range.
GPS is a high-tech wonder, say experts, but they don't replace backup directions and common sense.
"There is still a lot of misconception out there as to how GPS works and what it does do," Flight says.
"A lot of people believe all of the data and maps and pictures are downloaded in real time, and as soon as a new road is created, it's automatically beamed down to their devices."
GPS was developed by the US Department of Defence. About 30 satellites - solar-powered, with backup batteries - were launched into orbit between 1978 and 1994.
Not all operate at the same time, and the satellites must be replaced when they wear out.
Using latitude, longitude and altitude as markers, signals are beamed to receiving stations on earth.
Although consumer-grade GPS signals were available under the original design, they were scrambled and therefore only accurate to within 100 meters.
"It got you in the ballpark, but not where you needed to be," says Flight, adding that today's consumer-grade signals are no longer scrambled and are "95 per cent" accurate.
But GPS is only as strong as the most reliable maps, and manufacturers say consumers should download the most recent versions at least every other year.
Sometimes, when good GPS units give bad directions, people just don't want to believe that "Karen" - or whatever name they've bestowed on their talking navigation systems - is leading them astray.
Wasting time while lost is one thing, being led into danger quite another.
In Great Britain, Robert Jones refused to change course after his GPS instructed him to drive up a cliff-side path last year.
Running into a fence stopped him from plunging 30 metres down the side, but he was convicted of "driving without due care and attention" and fined almost $US3200 ($3435).
Part of that went toward paying for the nine-hour operation to get his car removed from the cliff.
"Part of it is because of that underlying weakness many of us have, where we are all too willing to surrender to this wonderful machine," says Ellard, a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
He says it's fine to use GPS - backed by other sources of information - but it's also important to practice "being in the here and now".
One of the concepts addressed in his book involves humans' loss of orientation skills as they moved into cities.
But even he has known the sting of GPS betrayal.
Driving back to Ontario after visiting his brother in central Ohio, he and the family decided it might be fun to follow the programmed directions.
It wasn't until some time later they realised it had been set to avoid toll roads.
"The only way to get to Canada doing that is to drive about an extra 400 miles. We realised we were being led to northern Michigan."
AP
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