D is for Driving Home

I’m doing this Blogging from A to Z thing. Today is D.

“Take the left lane to keep right.”

Wait, what…?

That was an actual direction Google Maps gave me on the way home tonight.

I live 50 miles from my office. Obviously, I know my way home. But with both the home and the office being in the northern, more crowded, end of our most densely populated state, the likelihood of a traffic mess somewhere along the route on any given day is pretty good.

So the phone goes up on the dashboard mount as soon as I get in the car, and I say “OK, Google Now…navigate home.” (And yes, I know how silly it sounds. But you need five syllables to get the phone’s attention to use voice control and everything else I tried sounded even sillier. And yes, I know I could launch the app manually, but what fun is that?)

Google Maps finds the best route and occasionally tells me things like “We’ve found a faster route,” or, sadly, because I live in New Jersey, “There’s a 35-minute slow down ahead caused by an accident. You are still on the fastest route.”

And then I use the really bad words that used to require a dollar contribution to the curse jar that sat in the back seat when my daughter was little.