Abandonment

What a wasted day I've had. It's a long story, so if you've nothing to do keep reading. If however you're flirting with using office bandwidth I should move along.

At the weekend I decided that I should add a new hobby to my arts and crafts portfolio, and I decided upon beading, in particular beaded jewellery. So, in order to start doing said beading I need to get supplies in and of course the first stop is the internet. I find numerous sites that provide the goods I require, but most of them look well dodgy, and forgive me for being over cautious, but I wouldn't plug my address details into them let alone my credit card number. However, I find one online shop that whilst looks amateurish has a good amount of stock, and in particular they have a vast array of Swarovski crystal which is what I'm after. They also have an actual shop in Nottingham which is about 1.5 hours drive from here.

Today then I decide to take a trip up to Nottingham to get the stuff that I need in order to make some bracelets and the like. I've got the address and punch it into the SatNav on the car and start up the m40 towards my destination. Everything is going fine until the SatNav bitch decides to go on strike. In fact not only does she go on strike, but the map bit does too. I'm currently hurtling into Birmingham with no idea of where the hell I'm suppose to go. I cant even cancel the SatNav and just go off the map because its frozen in time and space, it thinks I'm in Warwick which was where I was at about 30 minutes ago.

I'm now in a bit of a panic, so I pull over on the hard shoulder of the motorway (since the next services are 20 miles away) and I try all sorts to get the SatNav back working. I try to take out the navigation DVD and the bloody thing won't come out of the slot. So I try to enter a new destination, which it lets me do but the bloody thing thinks I'm still in Warwick so works out a route which is completely useless. I switch the car off for 15 minutes to see if that helps, not a sausage!! I then try to get the SatNav disk out again and this time it gives it to me. I give it a quick clean.... still nothing.

So in complete despair I ring up Phil at work to ask his advice, to which he suggests I turn around and go home, there is no point in getting insanely lost by carrying on, when I'm only partially lost as it is and could probably make it back in one piece if I cut my losses. So thats what I do when I finally get to a junction which allows me to switch over to the other side of the motorway.

Let me tell ya, it didn't take me long to get home, in fact I go so far to say as it took me precisely 20 minutes less time to get home than it took me to get to halfway to my illusive destination.

You may be wondering why I didn't have a good old paper map in the car, well tbh why should I have when I forked out a small fortune of a GPS version. You may also wonder why I didn't pull over and buy a map... well forgive for not knowing a) where all the map sellers are in Birmingham or b) not wanting to drive another 20 miles out of my way to the nearest service station.

Anyway, enough whinging from me. I've had a bad day.

Posted by Abi on the October 3, 2005 9:47 PM

sjon at October 5, 2005 7:14 AM