Warning! Do not rely too heavily on your GPS

I want to reach out to as many of you as I can as to why you cannot rely on technology for everything we do. I don't know if this is the best us forum to post this, but here it goes.

I was put in a dangerous situation. I work security for the film industry,
And I drive out to filming locations to monitor equipment and personnel. The film location I was scheduled to work at was a farm pasture on a rural road I have never traveled before. Driving out there it was really foggy and very dark; I couldn't see far in front of me. It was very tough to see any visible addresses on any of the properties on this road. These film locations are labeled with a yellow sign usually. But this movie is a new project I haven't worked on yet, so I didn't know what the sign should read.

Anyway my Google Maps GPS on my phone told me to pull in to this driveway of a house. This was shortly before 10:00 pm. This house seemed to look like the film spot; it had a yellow sign in front of it. So I pulled in and parked. But I was greeted by someone with a flashlight and a suspicious looking object. They asked who I was and what i was doing, and I told them I was the film security. They interrupted me and said for me to get the hell off the property or get shot, NOW! Move it!

I apologized saying it was a mistake as I moved back into my car. But the land owner wasn't one to reason. I'm sure me being dressed in all black with a stocking cap didn't help my cause either. I fired up the engine and got out of there.

After I called my boss and the stage manager. They told me the address and the sights to look for. The address was the same one I punched into my GPS, but the actual home with the correct address was a bit further down the road. I found the real location, and the address matched. Nevertheless my GPS still insists it is the wrong house down the way. I'm still a bit shaken up over all of this.

Moral of the story: don't expect your GPS to know everything.

 

i could have told you that. they're [usually] good with general directions, but specific addresses usually seem to be wrong. plus, they tend to take you on asinine routes. maps and common sense are generally a much better way to go.

 

i have a good sense of direction and paper maps made properly.. I wouldnt use a gps if you gave me 100billion dollars..

another thing paper maps are good for is fire kindle., if you ever get stranded.

 

what i really don't get is when people use their gps when they already know where they're going. back when i worked at pizza places (at least toward the end, gps didn't really exist at the beginning) a lot of the drivers would sit out in their cars and spend 5 minutes entering their delivery address into their gps when the house was 3 minutes away on the main damn road through town.

 

additional rule:

Never trust anyone "riding shotgun" to direct you, even if they have a map right in front of them (except if you have no other reasonable choice).

Never accept invitations to get "follow me" directions. You'll almost always get cut off/ separated, and it makes you more likely to get into an accident. Also, if you get separated enough, you'll have no idea where you are.

Never trust the directions that anyone gives you unless you have no other choice. They almost always fuck it up in some way.

I try to use an online map utility, and then verify it on a paper map.

 

My GPS is the handiest thing ever for my pizza deliveries since I'm working in a town where I'm not familiar at all with the neighborhoods. But I let it take me to the street and then do my own searching for house numbers. It's wrong about the exact address about 60% of the time.

 

Glad you weren't shot. Sounds like that homeowner kept his head right, given it was rural and you were on his property dressed in all black.

 

Pizza guy here, GPS will only take you so close.

Your GPS said, "you are here" it did not tell you to pull in the driveway, or get out of the car.

You should look at mailbox addresses or wherever they post them.. They are almost always in a system and you can figure out your GPS's discrepencies from that shit..

rural addresses in ohio almost always have addresses posted on or near the mailbox at the end of the driveway. otherwise the address is on the house itself... There has definately beeen times where my GPS has been a little off and I looked at the address and was like, "this ain't right" and figured it out for myself...

oh, and undies - pizza dudes that need their gps like that get driven around. I make so much money than them assholes I hope they stay stupid.. I'll take thirty runs to their twenty anyday

 

yes. i've never had this work as planned. usually just someone needs to pull over and wait for a minute, but there have been a couple near-disasters too.

don't they have a giant map on the wall like every single pizza place i've ever worked in? reading the map and maybe taking notes on the complicated deliveries takes a minute, but no longer than programming a gps. and you actually learn the area this way, whereas i'm not sure you really do if you just wait for your computer to say "turn left here."

 

mona is a pizza guy now? im' so glad for you!! DQ can eat a dick until I want a blizzard this summer lol

just remember.. odd addresses are on the north and west, and evens are on the east and south

 

oh this may be teh issue the OP had

 

occasionally there is no address on a given house, but worst case, you look at the neighbors' addresses and figure it out pretty quickly.

yeah, i had no problem with it when i was running deliveries. it was just when i was managing that it would drive me crazy to watch some dumbass sitting in the parking lot programming his gps for no reason while other deliveries were piling out of the oven.

 

that's not always true. every town i've worked in, there has been one intersection that was 0 north/south and 0 east/west. then from there the addresses climbed in both directions, with evens on the right as you drove away from that intersection, and odds on the left. so on north main, for example, evens would be on the east, but on south main they would be on the west.

 

GPS can fuck you up for sure...seems like those things can't make up their minds which route they wanna take. recalculating...

I think it depends on the GPS and the software it uses tho...that is where it fails

 

Do not rely too heavily on your girlfriend for birthcontrol

 

yes you're right about figuring out addresses via neighbor's addresses. I've even told a few of them politely that I knew this house was such and such because their neighbors pretty address was showing..

also, now I am a manager, not because I want to but because my license is suspended and I must say, these shitty drivers take so long that I have to fudge their in/out times in the computer to make it look better on me.. I hate that and I tell them they have to hurry up and whatnot.

When you become a manager, it's not about the experience, its about how good you want to look to to the owners/higher ups. But at my company we all know each other pretty well, and I can just tell my bosses, "look how good I made shitty driver's numbers look".. they know what's up

 

in Manhattan there is an algorithm to find the closest cross street to street address. You take the building number and divide by 20 then look in the table and find the avenue that the address is on and add the "magic number" for that avenue to the result. The final number is the closest cross street. This link explains it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_address_algorithm

I tried it on a chicken spot and it works, don't know how they came up with that though.

 

yeah, that's the same reason i got into management.

and yeah, fudging numbers is basically the number one job of a pizza manager. the goals that are set for you are physically impossible otherwise; you can meet them half the time if you're good, but to average what they expect every week just cannot be done unless you're some sort of psychic.

 

my company may be differrent than yours.. they dont "expect" anything of me besides that I service every customer

but I am not salary.. I work at two stores hourly andn do not collect overtime unlelss I get more han forty horus at one store.. So basically I have two two part time jobs at the same place..

 

i was only salary for a little while too. but i worked for 4 different companies and they all cared more about numbers than legitimate service.