The Voices Telling You Where To Go
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
It doesn’t take too many brains to realize there are far too many occupations out there bearing too much of the workload in today’s society, largely due to the COVID pandemic and the aftermath of that disaster. Health-care workers are certainly among them. There are too many other overworked folks to begin to list them all. I’m sure you could rhyme off a half-dozen without much trouble. However the most stressed out folks (all ladies strangely enough) who must be constantly close to nervous breakdowns or whatever the medical profession has chosen to call it when a person goes off the deep end and suddenly feels the urge to bang his or her head on a brick wall. And their plight has nothing to do with the pandemic. Who are these people you may ask?
The ladies I am talking about are the unsung heroines on duty sometimes 24 hours a day with next to no relief, and from what I gather, damned few coffee breaks. They are those wonderful ladies we never see or will we ever meet whose calming voices guide us down the highways and byways of this great country through fair weather or foul, as we battle temperatures that can freeze our buns off or force us to rest those buns in a tub of Ozonol on a hot summer day until the blisters finally heal. Yes, dear friends, I am talking about the GPS ladies who sit on high in those little satellite thingies day in and day out, night after night, just to make sure we get to our destinations.
And why are they all women? It is simple, women were chosen because they never swear, or at least I have never heard a lady say bad words like ^#@**^ or the really bad one +!$## and I hope I never do. Can you imagine the reaction if some jerk of a man was up there in the sky if he told you to stay on the Kings Highway 401 for the next 30 kilometres and you, like the blithering idiot you are, suddenly decided to dart up some side road because you in your infinite wisdom decided it was a better way even though the GPS gentleman is looking down at you and damned well knows your so-called shortcut will actually end up in some farmer’s barnyard.
You know what a man in a satellite would say, “Why you no-good, torn-down, %#$&&^” and then open another pint and just leave you there staring at a barnyard full of cows.
But not a lady GPS person, she would remain ever so calm and say, ”First wipe the cow-poos from your rear-view mirror and when it is safe, reverse down the lane to the nearest side-road (oops watch out for that rooster) and then drive carefully to Concession Road Six, return to Kings Highway 401 from whence you came and now continue on for 35 kilometres, not 30, since you lost 5 kilometres when you acted like a complete ass.”
Can you even imagine the stress those ladies are under knowing that at least once, but likely four or five times every trip, the bozo driving the car, truck, SUV or even one of those electric suckers, will suddenly take off on a whim and get so hopelessly lost that not even God can find him. (I stole that line from the hit song, They Called the Wind Mariah from the Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon. I‘ll wait until you finish singing the song before I continue.)
I must admit that GPS systems confuse me. I know those ladies are up there somewhere but I have never seen them. Surely there all aren’t crammed into the same satellites with the TV and military people. Perhaps they are in one of those Chinese balloons. If they are I would be rethinking that decision. The whole business is much too complicated for a simpleton like me to understand. I have enough trouble trying to read a road map. And while we are at it, if I am driving a Nissan why does the GPS lady speak to me in English. What if Sessue Hayakowa should take over, will she switch to Japanese?
I am so confused I think I will lie down for a while. Better still, maybe I should just pour myself a beaker of sake and go for a drive – or maybe not. The lady up there will call the OPP.
