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I know why car accidents happen.
The reason, on some occasions at least, could be because of Jane, the voice of a well known brand of GPS satellite navigation system. Having bought one recently, I now suspect she (or her male counterpart Mark) is probably to blame for a lot of dodgy driving out there.
I pride myself on being a fairly good driver. In 21 years on the road I have had one minor bump, occurring the week after my test, which was the result of an over familiar resident speeding down a country lane and taking a blind bend a tad too fast and too far out into the on-coming lane.
The rest of my driving career has been fairly uneventful, except for the occasional wrong turn or missed exit.
However, as time has gone on and the demands of my son's athletics career are taking us further afield, navigation has begun to be the major travel issue and although I am confident in route planning and map reading, navigating on my own is a definite issue as my son often just wants to sleep on the way home, whereas I spend the journey going, "which exit, which exit?"
I have also found myself getting more agitated earlier and earlier before an event and then everyone in my happy household suffers as I run around the house like a headless chicken screaming, "Where are my Google maps? We have to leave in three minutes and 25 seconds!"
So, despite reading personal injury compensation tales of woe about car accidents caused by distracted driving, I decided to take the plunge and buy a sat-nav.
I read the customer reviews, I got a rather nifty demonstration from a work colleague of his system, I chose my make and model, reserved it online and then collected my little piece of technological heaven and I hoped it would take the hoping out of car journeys.
I gave it a little test run and ‘Jane' took me to my nearest chemist without a hitch. So I went to bed that evening without having route planned or having printed maps of various stages of the journey because I felt I could trust Jane and her superior navigation skills.
The journey started badly; having picked up another athlete, I immediately took a left turn instead of a right (I swear blind the picture pointed left, my son is convinced Jane told us to go right), but we turned round and were soon back on Jane's chosen course.
Then, within ten minutes of our two hour journey, we had to get off a fairly complicated roundabout with traffic lights and as Jane told me to "take the exit, stay right" I blanked and said out loud, "How can I take the exit and stay right?" It took me one go round the roundabout to realise what she was going on about and we were soon on the dual carriageway and heading, once again, in the right direction.
However, I soon took issue with her driving instructions. A mile away from a roundabout on which we had to take the third exit, travelling along a stretch of empty dual carriageway, she kept insisting that I "keep right". "No!" I said quite forcibly and promptly took the correct driving position in the left hand lane. Yet she kept insisting that I take the right hand lane even though there was no justifiable reason why I needed to be out there.
A ha, the penny dropped, Jane is the reason why so many drivers appear to race into the right hand lane and then slavishly sit there doing fifty miles an hour while impatient drivers zoom up behind them and then undertake in the left hand lane. It's a bad driving habit that really annoys me and now I know one of the possible causes of this car accident and road rage inducing behaviour. Some drivers must think, if Jane tells you do it, you must obey.
We plodded on with our journey, but Jane tried to take us on a ludicrously longer length journey down what looked like a particularly windy little B-road, so I turned the car back onto the A-road and switched her off, only to realise that once we got to our destination town, we had no idea where the stadium was or how we would reach it. Luckily, once in the vicinity, we switched her back on and she took us painlessly to our required venue.
As we decamped from the Astra, my charges laughed, berating me lightly for our tardy arrival, and I pondered the notion that I might just have flushed quite a large chunk of my weekly wage down the proverbial money eating toilet.
However, later that day, our guide got us painlessly out of the seaside town that had been our host, and with only one minor adjustment at a roundabout (this time we all agreed Jane couldn't count exits) we got home via our preferred route and I drove in the lane I wanted to drive in, thank you very much.
No detour, no car accident, just a rather large learning curve. Technology -I love it - or do I loathe it? I'm never quite sure – it's a bit like left and right. I'm never quite sure.
