I don’t know when I gave up. Gave up on knowing how things work. When did I tell myself to forget it, that I was never going to fully understand how a particular device managed to turn on, make noise, produce a picture or send information? I am ashamed to say it but I do not truly understand how most of what I use on a daily basis works.
Now besides the cell phone, the computer, the internet, and a myriad of other systems, devices, machines, apparatus, gadgets and contraptions, there is yet one more. The GPS. Global Positioning System.
On my way to the far Philadelphia suburbs the other evening, I sit in the passenger seat of my daughter’s car utterly intrigued by the GPS screen in front of me. The GPS was her gift to herself from money made babysitting. Seems she got sick and tired of getting lost on her way to, you guessed it, babysitting jobs. Unfortunately, she has inherited the same lousy sense of direction as her mother – a trait I’d hoped would not be passed on in the genes – along with a slight tendency towards obstinacy. No such luck.
So there I sit studying the GPS thingamajig and marveling at the animated map with the little car running along the colored intersecting lines of streets and highways and loving the depiction of the winding blue Delaware River. I am beset with a whole bunch of questions on how this wonderful system works. I toss them one after another to my daughter as they occur to me.
“I know we’re being tracked by satellite,” I tell her “but how exactly? And there are so many cars with GPSes, how is it that signals don’t get crossed? How does it keep track? And that little map, it’s not an aerial photo, right, so it must be programmed in, but how? And have they programmed in a map of the entire world?” I go on and on. I want to know. I need to understand.
My daughter doesn’t. After a few gallant attempts to supply answers from her general store of knowledge, she is ready to give up. She knows she can’t appease me; she can’t possibly teach me what I long to know. When she’s had enough, she calmly turns and says, “Mom, it’s technology. You’ve just got to accept it.”
“Yes, of course you’re right,” I say, seeing that it is way beyond me and her and there are some things neither one of us will ever understand. “But just tell me one more thing,” I plead, my last-ditch attempt at understanding, “how does that woman’s voice work? How is it activated? “How do they do it?”
This time, with less patience, my daughter finally puts the questions to rest, “Mom, it’s the spirits. They do it all,” she tells me.
Makes sense to me. I give up.
Tags: GPS, technology
Sixties Chick 
February 12, 2009 at 9:26 pm |
Yes, you are correct it is the spirits!
That is exactly how I explain it to “non-techies”.
But it reality it has to do with the number of satellites in the sky, a unique code in your unit that is tracked from satellite to satellite and many other things.
The voice is just a “text-to-speech” conversion program that literally reads the text “Turn Left at Main Street” and produces the sounds associated with that combinations of letters.
Cheer up! You don’t to know how it works to use it and enjoy it!
February 13, 2009 at 11:42 am |
It’s a male conspiracy, obviously…