Ah, one of the many wonders of modern technology...the GPS receiver. Let the little box uplink to the satellites, and you can you just let it tell you where to go. Right? Right?!? Well...sorta.
The makers of these devices would have you thinking they're damn near foolproof. Fools, OTOH, are way more ingenious than the GPS makers give them credit for.
The box is not infallible, and combined with operator error (aka: RTFM), the results can be either pretty amusing or pretty horrific, depending on your point of view (I'm mildly surprised that the guy who drove his million-dollar Bugatti Veyron into a Texas lake didn't blame it on the GPS).
Case #1: Big rig driver is looking for a delivery address, when his GPS (supposedly) tells him to make a left turn. As he's making the turn, he looks up and realizes that the turn pocket he's in leads nowhere but into the parking lot of a hotel, where he may not be able to turn his rig around.
His solution: crank the steering wheel hard right, which might work if there weren't a raised concrete island next to the turn pocket. The big rig then high-centers on top of the island, smashing the exterior fuel tanks before the truck comes to a stop, stuck.
By the time I get there, a river of diesel fuel from the punctured tanks is running down the street, and the Fire guys are having to call for the Street Dept., as they've run out of absorbent. We now need to wait for a tow large enough to haul the truck off, and the big question is whether the tanks are going to leak even worse once the truck gets pulled off the median (they didn't).
Final tally: drived cited for unsafe turning and failure to use a designated truck route, a couple of hours cleaning up the hazmat incident, and a hit and run collision that occurred in the hotel parking lot as we diverted traffic through it. And that address he was looking for? Not even in Small City, but in another city ten miles away (and not readily accessible from the freeway he was on).
Case #2: Another big rig driver, with some kind of enormous piece of machinery on a lowboy trailer, exits the freeway onto one of Small City's main thoroughfares. At the top of the off-ramp, he cuts the corner too close to a traffic signal, shearing the signal pole off at the base. The signal head then falls onto the rear of the truck, smashing the signal lamps. The broken glass cut the lines to the truck's air brakes, immobilizing it in the traffic lanes, until a mechanic was able to come out and repair it.
Driver #2 was looking for a delivery address in a city over an hour away by freeway.
The one thing these geniuses had in common? "My GPS told me to turn left."
Remember when you had to actually demonstrate some driving skill in order to be a truck driver?!? I don't think it was that long ago...
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