I Hate Google Maps

Every time Apple releases a new product in one of its more popular lines, I know we’re in for a rollercoaster manic-depressive experience. After the lines and the Twitter and Facebook updates every fifteen minutes and the general elation of consumer avarice that floods the airwaves and internet, someone discovers some flaw or shortcoming that somehow got overlooked in the great anticipation over the newest and latest and hottest device. It gets a little press, which gets leapt upon by the company’s rivals and naysayers, which then gets whipped up to such proportions that it’s called a scandal, eliciting schadenfreude from everyone who didn’t buy the damned thing, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who did. Then it sells a kerjillion units anyway and a couple of weeks later everyone’s forgotten about whatever it was that was supposed to bring the company to its knees.

We’ve all lived through Antennagate, that issue with the iPhone 4 that no one would shut up about for days and weeks, in which if one pressed kind of hard at a certain spot on the phone’s exterior, the number of bars in the signal strength would drop. Something like that. I could never get it to happen on mine, and I used the thing without a case for two years. With the last iteration of the iPad, the blogosphere attempted to whip people into a frenzy about it running warm. No, it wasn’t running warm, it was hot! Untouchable! BOILING! People pointed infrared cameras at the thing to show how dangerous it was for anything except for frying hamburgers, and the scandal lasted for a week, until someone actually measured the heat and found it was only about six degrees more than the previous iPad, and everyone shut up about it. No one’s said a thing about either of the blow-ups in months.

The latest hue and cry, after last week’s release of the iPhone 5, has to do with its Maps application. Apple decided to ditch Google Maps as its default mapping application. It’s been known for months—months, mind you—that the new Maps had several features new to the iPhone’s default locations app, including turn-by-turn directions and three-dimensional renderings of larger U.S. cities, but that it wouldn’t have Google Maps’ street views, and that it wouldn’t have Google’s public transit directions, either. That didn’t stop a lot of users, as well as the tech press, from trumpeting last Friday how shocking were the omissions, and how awful it was that no one told them that they were coming! (The changes been written about for months, mind you.)

I find some of the huffing a little bit hypocritical. The weeping and wailing over the lack of public transit directions is perhaps understandable for those of us who live in New York City and its environs, or who reside in other big cities and rely on public transportation to get around. (Even so, I don’t get why everyone claims to be helpless and lost without the original Google Maps app. Until Google releases its own app, which it will, one can still get public transit information from the Google maps mobile website. Put a shortcut to the damned thing on your home screen if you love it so much. Or get another mapping app.)

But here’s the thing—a lot of the bitching and moaning I hear comes from people who don’t live in these cities. It comes from people who never use public transit. It comes from people whose pharisaism over the issue might lead you to believe they’re as green and pure-intentioned as that Native American from the public service TV ads of my youth, gazing sadly over the polluted wastes and smog of an urban landscape in moccasins and a leather jerkin and a full feathered headdress, a single tear running down a wise red-skinned cheek.

When in reality, they’re people whose only interaction with a city bus has been to gag and make comments over the fumes as they zoom by them in their SUVs. They’re people who will hop into their gas guzzlers and drive half a block from their front doors to the Pump ’n’ Pay at the end of their street to pick up a lottery ticket and a bag of Cheetos so they can return home and watch The Voice. Yeah, I’m talking about you, my people of Detroit.

All the sanctimony and bemoaning of the martyred Google also kind of distracts from the fact that Google Maps was really never quite the exemplar of quality goods that people are now lauding. I rolled my eyes at it on a regular basis. Even though they’ve been in the business for years and years, I’ve been quite used to Google Maps giving me one of its what I called ‘comedy routes’ whenever I attempt to drive somewhere unfamiliar. What I assumed should have been a straight shot down I-95 and getting off at exit eleven, say, Google Maps would want me turn into a general meandering down I-95 with a side trip off of exit 5 through a residential neighborhood until I got back on I-95 at exit 6, and then a similar wild vagabond adventure off exit 8, around a golf course, down a business route, turning left at a deserted gas station, making a U-turn, and then getting back onto 95 at exit 10 for the final quarter-mile to my destination.

I’ve had Google Maps give me its comedy routes when I’m trying to bypass New York City to its north in a straightforward fashion, via the Tappan Zee Bridge—but no, every single one of its routes will try to direct me through the streets of the Bronx and downtown Manhattan, where I least want to drive. When I’ve been trying to drive past the District of Columbia and just wanted to know the name of the usual highway I take in the ring around the city, Google Maps has wanted to send me on a visit into the downtown area to the Washington Monument.

Last spring I used Google Maps in an attempt to walk from the subway to 34 West 15th Street in Manhattan, and it kept insisting I walk further and further west, despite the fact that the numbers were not getting smaller, but larger. (Worse, I kept thinking to myself, “This is Google Maps! It has to be right!”) Finally it told me I’d arrived when I was standing on the city’s edge in front of not the yarn store I’d wanted, but a nondescript auto shop, while I wondered why I could see Pier 54 and the Hudson River.

I’ve searched for Manhattan businesses by name in Google Maps, including the city information, and had it show me establishments with vaguely similar names in Plano, TX and Peoria. I’ve had Google Maps insist that there were restaurants open and existing in spots where no restaurants stand. And it’s not the only mapping service that pulls these stunts—I still shudder when I think about the time in Craig’s car that its turn-by-turn navigation had us going in a circle around a single city block in White Plains for several minutes until we were white-faced and frantic for escape. (White Plains is already enough of a No Exit city as it is, without that kind of ‘help.’)

As for Street View: I like the sound of it in theory. I had a fun five minutes when it came out looking up my address and seeing the trash set out to the curb in front of its capture of my old home. I used it a couple of times to attempt to see what a strange destination might look like when I arrived. But I also very quickly learned that the correspondence between a Street View address and an actual address is fairly low; if you were to look up my current address and look at the Street View, you’d come to the conclusion that I live either in a graveyard plot or smack in the middle of a pond. I found myself having to move up and down Google’s virtual streets and memorize several blocks of landmarks, because it was impossible to tell what it thought was 11 East 33rd Street really was 11 East 33rd, or somewhere three blocks away. Frankly, I find Street View mostly useless.

Reliable and consistent, Google Maps is not. It never has been. During my last driving trip to Richmond in the spring, Google Maps kept trying to lure me off of I-95 and the George Washington Bridge into Washington Heights, and when I refused, it announced in a fit of pique, “Fine! GPS disabled, asshole!” (the ‘asshole’ part might’ve been my imagination, admittedly) and turned itself off—which made me panic and start to try to stab my finger at it like a blunt weapon, while driving in the truck lane.

On the way home when it pulled the exact same stunt right at the juncture of I-95 and its various offshoots around and through DC, I yelled “WHATEVER, Google Maps! I don’t want your STINKY DIRECTIONS ANYWAY!” at it and ignored it until it very bashfully turned itself back on around Baltimore. It was so meek and mild after, and didn’t attempt to steer me, Tardis-like, to sites that were never my destination that I didn’t even notice it had sneakily prompted me to leave my route and take a drive through downtown Philadelphia. Not until I approached the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and saw the masts of old Revolutionary-era sailing ships in the Philadelphia Harbor did it dawn upon me that Philadelphia was not and never had been on my route between New York and Richmond.

(Sadly true story.)

Electronics wars are silly. I don’t like that the tenor of public discourse these days is aimed at leaving nothing but scorched earth beneath a rival’s feet; there’s no absolute victor here to be cheered, no abject loser to spit upon, bury, and then to sow his grave with salt. Consumer choices are not religion. I’m not really interested, generally, in what brand of peanut butter another person buys, or whether they buy peanut butter at all. Investing one’s energies in denigrating the choices another person makes in choosing a smartphone brand is as inane as would be rabid fans of Skippy facing off against lock-step hissing followers of Crunchy Jif, while in a corner the everyday users of Goober complain that they never, ever get any attention.

I know in another week the glow will have worn off the story and people will go back to their usual grousing about whatever map service they end up using. (Or not using, as is the more likely scenario.) But dang, people. Google Maps is one of the most capricious evil intelligences out there. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Plus I think it has a personal grudge against me, for some reason. Maybe because I just compared it to Crunchy Jif?

Adventures from the Church Desk: Kwawffee and a Nice Pudding

“You always get the weird stuff,” is what the church staff tell me when I sit at the reception desk.

I can’t aver with all my conviction that the statement is true. After all, I’ve passed several very long mornings at the front desk during which the wildest thing to happen is a spirited debate about the merits of frozen yogurt versus ice cream, or when the high point was connecting seven cows in a rousing game of Puzzle Craft. There’ve been a few shifts during which the only sounds I’ve heard are the muffled ticking of the grandfather clock as it slowly scrapes away another second of the afternoon, and the occasional intrusion of my husband as he sticks his head in the door and wants to know why I’m not done stamping and hand-numbering that three-foot stack of music he dumped on me, oh, all of fifteen minutes before.

But yes. When I stride into the church and stick my nameplate into its slot, and when I take the phone off its voice mail, I always get a giddy sense that just about anything could happen. Very often it does.

Yesterday was a pretty typical Monday morning designed to keep me on my toes. It began with me assisting the two very frail and elderly women who apparently comprise the church’s quilting league. They’d already assembled their quilt and stretched it on a massive wooden frame. It was my job to navigate that frame onto the tops of four chairs they’d arranged into a square in the middle of the room—but more importantly, to stick around for a few minutes after and listen to them tell me about their love for the dying art of quilting. I’d helped a man find a specific plot in the cemetery. I’d had a nice long talk about the cemetery itself with a location scout for a David Duchovny movie, which the producers wanted to use for a funeral scene. That had led to a discussion about the differences between graveyards in Greenwich (pretty!) versus graveyards in his native Brooklyn (covered with graffiti!), how Tyler Perry used the church last year when he was shooting one of his movies in the area, and basically how traditionally churchy the church building looked.

I’d sent him off to take his photographs of the sanctuary and the cemetery when the phone rang. I answered it chirpily. “Yhello?” asked the woman at the end of the line. She sounded older, and had one of those Noo Yawk accents that New Yorkers don’t like to think they have, even though my brain has to go through all the exact same mental gymnastics it performs when trying to translate the consonants hitting my eardrums from the more colloquial accents found in a typical episode of Downton Abbey or EastEnders. “I understay-and there’s a funeral there on Saturday?”

“Mmmm,” was my reaction. I hoped it conveyed a balanced kind of sympathy—the sort of vague sorrow one experiences upon hearing of the death of a much older but no longer relevant Hollywood former star that one had already assumed was dead anyway, like Ernest Borgnine. I thought it sounded better than Could be. I’m here once a week, lady. It’s news to me.

“Well,” she said, and I could just hear her licking her lips at the other end as she prepared to launch into her speech. “I was wondering what the family is planning to do after.”

“After?” I asked.

“Yes. As in, were they planning to have just coffee, after the ceremony?” She pronounced it kwawffe, the way so many New Yorkers too. “Kwawfee and a few nibbles? Or were they planning to have more than just kwawffee?”

“Um,” I said.

“Maybe even instead of kwawffee and nibbles they’re having a nice buffet? With chicken and maybe a nice salad and a nice dessert or pudding?”

“Well—“

“Because I can’t imagine they’re just having kwawffee. Maybe kwawffee and a cheese plate. That would be nice. Or kwawffee and a nice cake.”

“I don’t—“

“I was really hoping that they were having a nice buffet after. You know. Chicken. And a nice salad. And maybe pudding. Or a nice cake or even a refreshing fruit salad. Though I’m not sure what’s in season. Blueberries? And maybe kwawffee afterwards. You know. Something nice.”

“Let me put you on hold for a moment,” I said smoothly, before she started mentally planning the apertifs.

I walked a couple of rooms over to the desk of the office manager. She looked at me with suspicion. “There’s a funeral on Saturday?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” she replied.

“There’s a woman on the phone who’s asking if the family’s planning on serving kwawffee and nibbles or whether they’re having a nice buffet with pudding. Do we know . . . ?”

She stared at me for a moment. “Are you serious?” I shrugged and winced. After a long, wearied sigh, she shook her head. “Oh good god.”

Back at my desk, I took the woman off hold and apologized for keeping her waiting. “Yeah,” I said, trying to sound as apologetic as possible. “It’s really up to the family to make those arrangements, and if they’ve made them somewhere else, we don’t always know their plans.”

“Oh really.” She sounded put out, and a bit curt. “So you can’t even tell me if it’s kwawffee and cake, or kwawffee or a nice cheese tray, or a buffet with a nice salad and—“

“And pudding, no.” I tried to ooze sympathy. “Noooo, they haven’t left us with a menu. I really can’t tell you.”

“Well!” she harrumphed. Then she paused. “Maybe you could tell me this: are the family planning to keep the flowers, after the funeral’s over? Or will they be giving away some of the nicer bouquets to people attending?”

A moment later, when I’d hung up and was trying to blink and recover some thoughts that weren’t of kwawffee and pudding, the office manager walked into the room. “Well?” she asked.

I told her about the conclusion of the call. “Man!” she said. Then she shook her head. “You always get all the weird stuff.”

This time I couldn’t deny it.