In the name of balance, after proclaiming my love for computers and Internet:
Yesterday I ordered take-out food over the web, and it was loooong delayed. I called them, and they had been trying to call me on an old phone number: they couldn't find me, because my address did not show up on their satellite navigation system.
And just a couple of days ago, a parcel was delivered by a guy who'd walked a ways from his van, because his sat nav had directed him to the street behind this complex, where there's no driving entrance.
It seems both these guys/companies in a short time have become so dependent on satellite navigation that they no longer think to even carry a map anymore! In a few years, if the GPS system crashes, half the motored world will come to a crashing halt too. Lame.
5 comments:
I have exactly the same problem with my house (though it's been here over 100 years!)
Not only does it not show up on Sat-Nav, but even the venerable Google Maps shows the location incorrectly when presented with the address / postcode!
Not so much of a problem, you would think ... until you need the fire service / ambulance / police, who have all told me at various times that they cannot find my address. Thankfully, in each instance, none of these call have been a request for an emergency, but it does make you wonder, no?
Yes.
I love google maps, but it often has a location slightly off. My postcode, a handful of apartment, is shows by a pointer between two roads.
Another amazing fact I can't get over:
I guess google maps get their data often from pretty old sources. There's a pretty small area behind where I live, with a couple of sleepy industrial businesses. Real tiny, you can walk around it it in a couple minutes. But if you look it up on google maps and really zoom in, you find that this area has SIX DIFFERENT street names!
Two of them belong to the "main" street, which is maybe 200 meters long!
One of them looks more like a parking lot in reality.
One of them looks like a cobbled driveway, pretty much too narrow to drive anything four-wheeled on at all, and it leads nowhere, there are no doors at all in in the side of the building it's next to.
And two of them are so over-grown that they don't *exist* anymore! No kidding, I can't see any streets there at all.
It must be data from the 19th century, I guess. It's insane, the whole thing would be better of with a single street name.
It seems both these guys/companies in a short time have become so dependent on satellite navigation that they no longer think to even carry a map anymore! In a few years, if the GPS system crashes, half the motored world will come to a crashing halt too. Lame.
I worry about this too. It's funny, men traditionally don't want to ask for directions, but I guess if it's a computer it's different somehow.
I remember this Isaac Asimov story where in the future computers had so long done our thinking for us that people had forgotten how to do even basic math. The same thing could happen to our ability to find our way around.
It's not totally down to GPS as such. The emergency services seem to only go on postcode and actually refuse to take directions even if you tell them that their postcode data will be wrong.
Some friends of mine lives in a small hamlet of about six houses. Theirs and another are accessed by one track and the rest by another small road from completely different directions (different counties actually, as it happens). There's a footpath between but you can't drive. As it's all one post walk they share the same postcode so the directions in peoples' databases always direct you up the somewhat less small road.
They often have problems with deliveries which take no notice of their directions and follow the GPS.
More seriously, a cyclist fell off his bike between the two houses on the small track, was bleeding profusely from the head and showing signs of concussion yet the ambulance service insisted on following the directions they had for the postcode even when told that they were probably wrong, delaying treatment quite unnecessarily.
Good grief!!
It must be very common with un-sensible divisions. The name for my address covers both smaller houses in a bunch, and a big square of apartment buildings. So drivers don't know which side to go to, and you can't see the numbers until you're standing next to the door.
And my closest friend in town lives on a road which is named the same of both sides on a bigger road... and then a tiny road to the side by the same name. It's near-impossible to give directions to the place.
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