Your GPS Is Probably Evil

Emily Yoffe is typically a technophobe, but she also has a horrible sense of direction, so she had high hopes for her GPS. “This seemed like a breakthrough that promised only upside,” she writes in the Washington Post. Then she used it. In harrowing trip after harrowing trip, the honey-voiced GPS lady got her lost. Now, she’s “convinced that my GPS was a cross between Lady Macbeth and HAL 9000.”

Even non-GPS owners aren’t safe from its machinations. Yoffe’s in-laws live on a cul-de-sac that GPSes persist in believing to be a through-road. They get a steady stream of lost souls; once, one blew up his car in their yard. He told police he’d snapped when he realized the GPS had led him astray. Crazy? Sure. But “when Lady MacGPS sends you astray, it feels like being lost on the Scottish moor, awaiting the crack of doom.” (More GPS stories.)