Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Twat nav

There’s a nice wee story in the papers about the school bus driver who entered the wrong information into his sat-nav system and took a bus full of kids to Hampton Court in London rather than their intended destination, Hampton Court Palace.

I think the AA’s advice should be printed on all sat-nav systems.

“Take a look out of the windscreen.”

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Carrie

Comments

0 responses to “Twat nav”

  1. Stephen

    A wee bit o’ common sense is certainly helpful with these things. But suggest that and some people are all “well, why bother with it then?” It seems it either has to be absolutely infallible, or else it’s completely useless.

  2. Squander Two

    > It seems it either has to be absolutely infallible, or else it’s completely useless.

    But this is not a case of the technology being fallible: the sat-nav worked perfectly. It is supposed to locate street names, and there is no road called “Hampton Court” anywhere near Hampton Court. If he’d typed in “Hampton Court Road”, which is the road on which Hampton Court is, it’d’ve worked.

    I think it’s wrong even to report on this as a technology story. If this driver had no idea that the Hampton Court he wanted wasn’t in N1, I see no reason why he wouldn’t have made exactly the same mistake using a paper map, since their indexes are also by street name. It’s like the case of the “Internet twins”: everyone reported on it as an Internet story, when in fact exactly the same fraud could have been perpetrated over the phone or by letter.

    My Grandma lived on Hampton Court Road till a few months ago, literally a stone’s throw from the palace gates. Beautiful place.

  3. Armin

    That reminds me of an experience probably about 5-6 years ago:

    I was staying in a posh hotel on the Isle of Skye, which had a set dinner. All the guests met in the lounge for a drink before the meal. After a while the host came in to inform us we should have another drink, we had to wait a wee while:

    A young couple from down south had trusted their sat nav a bit too much: Instead of on Skye they had arrived somewhere near Thurso or thereabouts. They were still on their way “back” to Skye…