Funny Thing about the GPS

On our last day of driving (from Toledo to Segovia), my GPS suddenly decided to stop working. It just died completely without any warning! Having owned this little thing for almost two years, I know that this could happen anytime and therefore I always have a safety pin attached to the GPS cover all the time so we can use it to poke the reset button hole in case it stops working.

The problem was I didn't know where the reset button was. I always thought the hole on the face of the GPS was the reset button. I was absolutely wrong! I poked and poked and poked, and nothing happened. All my friends were helping me poked it too. And still, nothing happened. Then all of us took turn to look for other possible reset button around the GPS and we couldn't find it. The only possible reset button was the one that we had been poking all along (or so we thought).

You see, even though I partly own this thing, my husband is the one who's using it. And I totally forgot about asking him where the reset button was or maybe I thought I knew where it was. So I tried contacting him but to no avail. He was on business trip in Denver at the time with a totally different timezone and therefore, I couldn't reach him.

In the end, we gave up on poking it and with no map, we had no choice but to just follow the road sign. Having had to look at the road sign, we noticed that Spain has a lot of weird spots to put them up. Sometimes they were right before the turning, sometimes they were in the middle of the roundabout, and sometimes they were too small for us to notice. But other times they were normally placed at the spots where you expect to find them. So you would really have to be looking around in case you miss them. And that was what we did and amazingly, we got to Segovia without any problem.

When I was back to London I searched the net on my GPS reset button and when I found it, I was laughing my head off. Apparently, there is another button hole. It was somewhere hidden at the back of the GPS. Who would have ever thought? That poor thing had been poked at the wrong spot over and over.

So what's the moral of the story? Talking about my ignorance to this thing, is ignorance bliss? In this case, maybe not. It would have been better if I knew about it. We would have reached Segovia on time with no drama whatsoever. However, to my defence, it didn't turn out so badly. I mean, OK, we were late but everything was under control. And my ignorance was the cause of this memorable event to happen - something to laugh about when we talk about this trip ;-P. But still, my advice is: in case of emergency, remember to always bring (or at least read at home) the manual of your electronic devices everytime you travel. You might need it :-).

This was where we poked it over and over - the poor thing.

And this is where we supposed to poke it.