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When lifetime services means something else

Or read the small print before you buy

 I am in the same cohort of adults as you, probably: with limited time for vacations, I am planning almost every day for seeing, sucking up scenery, tasting food or wines or having fun in a memorable way. Rarely there is a moment where playing by the ear is on my schedule. Often times I am forced to improvise as my plans are totally screwed by inevitable mishaps.
And here comes one of my reality encounters with what is a map in our days and how different than reality it is.One hand driving, one eye on map and one eye recording the imagery, brain where are you ? In today over-scanned/over-visited/over-blogged/over-you-tubed world to be driven in a dangerous or unknown place by the technology seems like a dystopian event. And still, that happened to me.

Garmin has an interesting policy regarding their own GPS devices - the maps are free for LI(F)E. What is not known, but hidden in the bottom of the license agreement, is that the lifetime they are talking about is the lifetime of the device, and Garmin decides when is the end-of-life for all their devices. Basically, you are buying the option to use a GPS device for several years, after that it will become a liability, or use it at your own risk. Even if the device is working very well, thank you China manufacturing, the only option to use it is to go back and buy the maps for the region you are interested in.


So, in my sudden urge to leave Toronto for the Algonquin park, I programmed my Garmin GPS and followed "the course of the road". After several hours of intricate directions I was staring to a barrier in a middle of a forest and a sign stating "Private Property". The voice insisted to go through the barrier and continue. The poor state of the road and the silence surrounding me made me realize how poor was the algorithm of road selection in the little box I was following for several hours. I returned  and stopped in the first village to find out an explanation of my conundrum. The first person I inquired about the directions for my destination was just laughing, I was one in a long row of people trusting technologies and eagerly throwing away the old maps.
The whole event created a muddy anguish regarding my safety use of technology and was the beginning of a rummaging process. I started to look out for the events where my critical thinking was totally dormant due to the technology flood infused "good news", where I left out the normal protection and was relying blindly on a device (be it software or hardware). 

I felt myself dangerously exposed because the media is blindsiding us you with messages of what incredible powerful and detailed are all the services around us, not mentioning the situations where people were led to deserted locations by the same GPS services or forced to utter stupid things based on an automatic translation software. 

I am not talking here about malicious use of services or devices (when big blue names are hiding second reasons they are collecting info or having access to data they should not pry on) but on genuine cases of mangled algorithms, corner cases or where "time-to-market" cut a lot of corners for the company "to-make-the-quarter".

Garmin GPS is one of my devices I decided to throw away, for now. And I started buying good old maps !
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