Gizmo

Gizmo

I drive a lot.

Maybe not as much as a truck driver or a salesman on a motor route, but enough that I spend an hour and a half to two hours on the road most work days. The place where I work is a county away from where I live and the route to work goes through a number of small towns, so I can't get there very fast. The drive can get lonely, too. All those solitary hours staring at the highway. So I turn on the radio and listen to this and that. I'm not a huge music fan, so a lot of the time I'm tuning around for talk shows. During my hours of travel, which are afternoons heading to work and after midnight on my way home, the choices are few in this part of Ohio. I've discounted a few I can't stand to listen to and that leaves two stations that I gravitate toward. On the way to work in the mid-afternoons I usually start out with a Cleveland sports and news station who's host at that time of day is entertaining and infuriating by turns. Some days he's quite interesting and I enjoy listening to him. Other days he is, quite simply, difficult to stomach. On those particular days he's so annoyingly opinionated that he makes my skin crawl. Or he's off on a rant deprecating his radio staff unmercifully, calling them idiots, fat slobs, incompetents. I marvel at how they maintain their loyalty to him. I don't believe I could ever work for him. I know it's probably just an act but it feels real. So on those annoying days I flip to my alternative station. The host there is a nationally-known right-wing drum-beater.

No, not Rush. Another one.

Most of the time he's a one-note Charley. Attack the left, attack anything that might have the terrible word LIBERAL attached to it, attack, attack, attack. I think I could do his show most of the time in my sleep. He repeats himself a lot. He plays clips of his hated political foe's words over and over again until they've sunk into your subconscious and you begin to believe them unthinkingly. I guess that's probably his goal. His attack-dog mantras are interesting in a bad-accident-on-the-road-ahead-don't-look kind of way. You wonder what new misquote from the political left he's going to latch onto next. But his rants soon grow old and I grow impatient for more interesting material. Or more sinisterly, I find myself nodding my head in full agreement with him. He is very good at what he does. Even as a most-of-the-time-conservative I usually grow disenchanted with him after a while and start pitying his targets of the day. And switch the radio.

I feel like a tennis ball sometimes, going back and forth from the one yo-yo to the another. Sometimes I even give up and listen to music.

On the way home, after midnight, the choices are even more interesting. One station airs a well-known “alternative” radio show. It has ghosts, aliens, demons, lots of conspiracy-theorists, monsters, various flavors of apocalypse scenarios and other “psychic” material as its subject most nights. I find this quite interesting, at least most of the time, being a wierdo at heart, listening to the “experts” in the particular oddball field of the night converse with the always-pleasant and always-interested nice guy host. The numer of earnest nutters on this earth seems to be inexhaustible. But when they open up the phone lines to the public for their questions I find myself growing annoyed. The amount of dumb people with telephones who can hear this program and are up in the dead of the night is incredible! I'd sure like to think a lot of the calls are put-ons or fakers, but its pretty apparent that they're real and it's quite obvious that most of the caller's family's gene pool is really shallow. I can listen to this program quite contentedly some nights and others, either from subject matter or the incredible stupidity of the callers, I can't handle for a minute. Occasionally it's just too creepy to listen to while I travel the dark highways heading home. Usually it's just too dumb. On those nights I flip to the other station and listen to yet another conservative talk show guy. He's much easier on the ears than the afternoon attack dog. But that station is difficult to hear after dark most evenings, so I have to crank it up and listen to a lot of static to enjoy it. Some nights it's not worth the aggravation. So its back to music again.

So I was ready for another diversion to help my through my miles and my hours on the road. And I found one a few weeks ago.

I am on my home computer pretty much every day. One morning my cousin sent me an email and told me about a website called WOOT. This website appears to be one of the standard shopping sites, but they have a twist. They advertise only ONE thing per day for sale. It might be a computer, a set of speakers, a pair of ear buds, a coffee maker, a DVD recorder or maybe an MP3 player. It's usually something electronic or some sort of gadget. They have an unknown (to you) amount of these items for sale each day and when that amount is gone, they mark it “sold out” and you have to wait until midnight to see what the next new item for sale might be. It's a neat concept, their prices are very reasonable and I've almost bought any number of items.

A couple weeks ago I took the plunge and placed an order through WOOT.

For sale was one of those GPS gizmos that attach to your car's windshield and show you how to get from where you are to where you want to go. It was a refurbished Navigon 2100 and had a very reasonable price attached to it. I had been kinda looking at these things for a year or so and had decided they were too expensive – especially for what was, in essence, a toy. But this price was way reasonable, my queries on the Internet on the quality of this particular device were fairly positive, so I took a chance and bought it.

I remember the first time I used it. I'd received it one day and soon finished doing the setup on the unit as the directions showed. I carried it out to my car and attached it to the windshield and plugged it into the cigarette lighter socket. Then I turned it on.

And it knew where I was! How cool was that! A little map popped up and showed me that I was... at home! Wow!

I entered the address of the office where I work and, bingo, my route was displayed. I started my drive and the pleasant lady's voice began directing my turns and what streets and roads I should travel to get to my destination. Some of her ideas on how to get to work were quite amusing that first day. She needed a bit of tweaking. But after I did that, she was right on! I tried Miss Gizmo on a few other destinations and took some imaginative routes and she still got me where I was going quite handily. And as I would drive along I could glance over at her and... there I was! Traveling down the highway on my way to wherever.

I've had her for a few weeks now and enjoy her company on my drives. She is companionable and knows how to keep her mouth shut unless I start losing my way. Then she takes me by the hand (figuratively, of course) and leads me in the right direction. She always knows where I am, my speed, my direction, my elevation and how far I have to go to achieve my goal.

Sometimes I wish my wife were as informative!

So I'm enjoying Miss Gizmo's company for the time being. I'm sure one day she'll become commonplace and she'll be relegated to riding in my glove box instead of my windshield. She'll sit there quietly, waiting for the times when I need a hand navigating my way through life. And when I do she'll be my pal again, sitting happily on my windshield, pointing the way.