That Damn Blue Dot

In case you didn't pick up on it from my previous two posts, Tiffany and I get lost a lot.

I'll take the blame here because I am totally and completely without a sense of direction. Like any. I am also very particular about the best way for me to overcome that deficiency in my brain. For example, I operate just fine with listed directions and a little bit less fine with a map like the kind on an actual page. Because I have an old flip phone, I don't have a built in GPS wherever I am. I look up how to get somewhere before I leave the apartment and I write it down the old fashioned way. If I'm in the passenger seat, I like to use the road atlas we keep in the car to trace our path into the unknown.

But I'm never in the passenger seat anymore, at least, not if we're going into the unknown. That's because Tiffany doesn't believe in atlases or sticky notes with right and left turns listed in pencil or pen. She believes, like a growing majority of the population, in the i-Phone.

"Which way, babe?" she used to ask.

"Umm, hold on, let me just look here... have we already passed that one exit I told you about earlier?... oh! Here we are, take exit 324," I'd say.

"I just passed exit 324," she'd say.

And then we'd get into a fight. Poor Tiffany's sister Melody experienced this once when we decided to treat her to an afternoon in wine country. I was navigating in the passenger seat, but I was not navigating quickly enough, so Tiffany tried to force the i-Phone on me. I hate the i-Phone. I can appreciate its genius, but, for some reason, its genius is not accessible to me.

"Just type in the address," Tiffany said that fateful day Melody swore never to ride in a car with us again.

Typing on the i-Phone takes me 45 minutes, never mind that I can type 1 million words per minute on a real computer.

"Okay, done," I said.

"Now, which way do we go?"

"Right," I said. "Keep going this way... hmmm. Okay. It looks like the blue dot is going the wrong direction."

"We are the blue dot, Rebecca!"

"Ok, well, we are going the wrong way then, so turn around!"

At which point, Melody whipped out her Blackberry, typed in the address and began back-seat navigating. But it was too late. The damage was done. My navigational career was over. Tiffany skidded to a stop on the gravel shoulder so we could switch seats.

Which was fine with me because I am an excellent driver.

Except when it comes to parallel parking.