In defense, GPS doesn't work where I live and yet people refuse to believe that when I tell them. "Just give me your address" they tell me "No, you'll just get lost" I tell them. So an argument ensues and because "The Customer is Always Right" I end up breaking down and giving them the address.

Day of the reservation, phone rings, "Hello, we have reservations with you today and we can't find you."

Sometimes they're only an hour or so away, sometimes six hours.

Ooops, you kind of did an edit/ninja there on me. XD

Why doesn't it work? GPS satellites don't reach your area, or the streets are not marked to any known maps?

I don't know. :P I think it is something to do with how the area is programmed. If you plug in our exact latitude and longitude into a GPS it will take you right to our door but you plug in anything else and it's no go. It's not that I live in a remote area it's that people think I live in a remote area and whoever programmed in the highway and roadway names figured they didn't need to be very accurate because no one could possibly ever come up here, which is bullshit. Not to get off topic but I've been accused of being a con artist from vendors on Amazon who get really pissed when they see my address claiming that I'm just playing a joke on them.

Side note, you should try telling an 80 year old man your latitude and longitude when they are planning a trip up to see the fall colors. Oh, that always goes over REALLY well! :P

I've had a few offs with navigators in the past so I'm always a bit skeptical as to where the buggering thing is trying to lead me. Once it told me to follow the road for 7602 kilometres when all I wanted was to go home, a fifteen-kilometre drive at best. I knew the route, just wanted to see how the satnav would've tackled it.

Another time I was travelling with a friend from the north of the country where he lives to the very south to my place, a drive of seven or eight hours. We were using the satnav and I swear that it forced us to drive through the very mind of Stephen King. Around halfway through the journey we decided to pull over at the next service station for some coffee, coffee that we would not actually be enjoying for another forty or fifty kilometres (25 or 30 miles). It's not just petrol stations that were missing: we hardly saw anything in that time and distance. There were all of three people - all of them wearing a face that suggested they would lynch us if we ran out of fuel, broke down or even slowed down - a single car doing about ten, a couple of buildings scattered in two loose clusters that I hesistate to call towns, and that's it. No shops, no petrol stations, no road signs and no speed limits either. Even the satnav failed to display the speed limit for that bit even though it had done so everywhere else. For a long time, the only sign of civilized life was an advertisement that cheerfully welcomed us to the nearby ABC service station - 24 kilometres (15 miles) away.

Anyway, I still understand what you're on about; despite some bewildering routes and sending us through the imagination of famous horror novelists, satnavs seem pretty good these days. Even I use the map app of my Nokia on the occasional cycling trip.

On the other hand there are the people that don't believe you even if you are giving them instructions while sitting in the car when the navigation software is clearly off track. A quick "let me drive you home" trip was easily blown up from 15 minutes to 45 minutes as my boss dutifully followed the instructions of his iPhone. On every other intersection I was like "You know, you could take a turn left here, so we would be there in no time"... but what do I know about the route to my own home if Steve Jobs demands otherwise?

Well said. I've got an uncle who does that. He always ends up going WAY out of his way. Steve Jobs doesn't know side streets and short cuts and Steve Jobs doesn't know when some streets are jammed and not jammed. Where I live Steve doesn't know that M-41 while way shorter, is 10 times slower in the winter and hence a much longer and more dangerous to drive than M-26.

That's true. Even if they do listen to you, there are some obnoxiously persistent navigators that insist that their solution was best and ask you to do a U-turn instead of, say, thinking of another way.

Even though I don't recall seeing that bad miscalculations by the navigator I use, there's a point in that.

Then again, if he did follow your suggestion, then he possibly would have to switch off the navigator altogether, as he can't drive by listening to two conflicting instructions. It's like having both your wife and mother-in-law giving conflicting driving instructions at the same time.

If he had to switch off his navigator, hopefully you are not similar as the human navigator I had yesterday, which gave driving instructions too late, too vaguely, or sometimes not at all. :)

With a car navigator, you certainly still have to use your brains, since they don't know everything and can have wrong map data, like leading you to a street that has been cut, or recently changed into a one-way street, or tells you to turn to a direction you are not allowed to turn. Using a navigator should not make you switch off your brains.

Ahh, spring. The season when the snow melts, flowers start to bloom, everything is so full of life, and I have to lock myself inside if it's not raining...
-_-

I hate spring

Move to the U.P. where spring only last 10 minutes, and as a bonus 90% of us speak Finish.

STILL trying to buy that land. It's taking relatively forever (in slow-market real estate terms) to get answers to the questions we have. This isn't the fault of the broker - so far as I can tell - but that the landowner doesn't have at hand the answers to questions that any diligent prospective buyer would ask. Stupid shit like: water test results from the extant wells? How much does it cost to buy our share if we decide to tap into the community well? And a dozen or so other questions from before this point.

Why in the world would he NOT have provided her all of this type of info from the get-go, given that the land has been subdivided for a decade now and that we're not the first buyers? Or is it simply that we're the only ones that bothered asking these things? Gawd, I can't imagine not getting the low-down on water, septic, zoning, taxes, easements, etc., before making an offer...

If she had that info from him all along we could have made our offer four weeks ago and he'd have his money already. Instead, we're making her work her ass off for a much smaller commission than she'd get with a home sale - because he doesn't have his shit together. But hey, if they want the sale then we need that info.

Meanwhile... this land is about a mile or so from where Mom lives. But now that my step-dad passed a few months back, she's looking to move closer in by my brother and I. So close, in fact, that she's going to look at my neighbor's home Saturday. Ha! Really nice place, too. Small lot is the only drawback - the house itself is in fantastic shape for being around 90 years old and we'd be all over if we were moving to this area for the first time. So I'm kinda hoping she can get it, but also hoping she doesn't since that's REALLY close. In-town is fine but next door might be pushing it. Maybe. Probably be fine - she's not one to get in your business all the time anyway. Guess it's moot until she sees the place first-hand.

A recent conversation with this girl I know: (with all of the grammatical mistakes ironed out)

Her: I really, REALLY hate auto-tune.

Me: Well then why do you listen to Marianas Trench?

Her: Because I can and I listen to Billy Talent and the list goes on

It's stuff like this that really just want me to bang my head against the wall.

Just for knowing her, I feel sorry for you.

Have some things to bitch about and get off my chest:
1. I absolutely HATE when my customers insist in paying small amounts of money with big bills to get some change. Yesterday one client payed 2 pesos, with a 200 pesos bill. It doesn't matter if i put signs asking them to pay with change or smaller bills. They completely ignore it. The thing is I can't easily get more change nearby, because my neighbors also ask me for change all the time. My neighbor from the cake shop came yesterday, first to ask me if the 500 pesos bill he had in his hand was real, and then after I taught him how to know if a bill is fake or not, asked me if could change it for smaller bills. I just sighed and changed him the bill. Apparenty I became some sort of bank, because they are too lazy to go to a real one as I do.
The funny thing is when I pay something with the closest amount possible, they don't have change. Once I bought a corndog and some fries at a local business for 34 pesos. I tried to pay with 3 10 pesos coins and 1 5 pesos coin and the guy at the counter told me that he didn´t have change. Or the time when I tried to pay a 70 pesos taxi fare with a 100 pesos bill and oh surprise! the taxi driver didn't had change. Even when I try to be reasonable and patient sometimes is really hard to remain calm.
2. I just found out that my ex-girlfriend, which I was seeing the last 3 months to see if we could make things work again, is still in touch with the guy she "cheated" on me. I wrote "cheated" because she denied him that I was her boyfriend at the time. That I was only a friend who tried to repair her laptop and couldn't. This I know because that time she didn't logged out from her gmail account when she borrowed my computer and I read everything. This time, I borrowed her a spare cellphone I had, because some guy mugged her and took her phone. 1 week after she replaced her phone and gave me back the one I borrowed her. The thing is the next day, she asked me if I could borrow her my spare phone again, because she forgot some numbers on it. I offered her to write down the numbers and send them on a message but she started to act suspicious:
"No, no. It's not necessary. I don't want to bother you."
"I dont mind." But then it hit me and then I asked her "Or there is something you dont want me to see?"
"No, not al all!"
"So, you wouldn't mind if I check the text messages do you?"
To make my story a little shorter, I found a lot of text messages to this guy. In one of them she wrote that she missed him and she called him to hear his voice. In other she wrote him that her roommate's boyfriend brought her a mariachi band for her birthday and my ex inmediately remembered him after hearing one of the songs(the other guy, or am i the other guy?). Stuff like that. I feel like a complete and utter moron for trusting her again. As the say goes: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me". After a lot of excuses and emotional blackmail from her, the only thing I could say was: "Good grief you are going to leave to another city for your new job".
3. And if that wasn't enough, the grandmas of two of my friends died in this same week.
Sorry for the long ass post.