I’m a big fan of GPS navigation systems.  I’ve owned several, I’ve played with several different software packages, heck I even had a car that came with a system built in.

As much as I like GPS navigation, and rely on it often I always have a degree of skepticism when I use them.  Even when I’m using one to get somewhere that I’m completely unfamiliar with, there are always some cues that let me know if the system is at least getting in the ball park.  In addition, no matter what my GPS says, I’m not going to let it guide me the worng way down a one way street or into a building like somebody in Germany did a few years ago. 

Every GPS I’ve every owned gives me some combination of distance to destination, estimated time of arrival, or estimated time remaining until arrival.  Knowing that the town I’m headed to is just 30 miles or so away, if my GPS shows that the distance to my destination if 450 miles I can tell right off the bat that there’s a problem…

But still every so often story like this one comes out.  How is it that an ambulance crew who’s instructed to transport a patient 12 miles away doesn’t realize that they’re off course until they’ve driven 200 miles!  This ambulance crew drove almost all the way across the country before realizing they had gone too far.  Did anybody bother to tell the ambulance crew where they were supposed to go?Â