…who told me once that he and his wife are more into nature then technology.

Three bridges within a mile hit SIXTY-TWO times by curse of satnav

It has been blamed for directing huge articulated lorries down tiny country lanes, encouraging car drivers to plunge into impassable fords – and even sending inattentive motorists down railway lines.

And last night, it was revealed the curse of satnav has found yet another way to wreak havoc on Britain’s roads – by funnelling tall vehicles under low bridges.

The problem came to light after rail chiefs realized that three of the railway bridges most often hit by traffic lay in a one-mile radius in the same town: Grantham in Lincolnshire. Between them, they were struck an astonishing 62 times last year.

Half involved one of the structures, earning it the dubious distinction of being Britain’s most crashed-into railway bridge.

A spokesman said: "It’s a rising problem and satnavs are playing a greater role. They are great tools but they are no substitute for common sense and following the rules of the road."

An AA spokesman added: "The fact that you’re getting bridges with a reputation for being hit suggests that satnav software is directing large numbers of vehicles to take those particular routes.

"The problem is ‘blind reliance’. If people were using a map they would be more likely to question whether a bridge was high enough for their vehicle but it’s staggering to what extent people are blindly relying on technology."

Freight Transport Association director Geoff Dossetter agreed: "Satnavs are wonderful for drivers in unfamiliar territory but if a road sign says ‘low bridge ahead’ there really shouldn’t be any doubt about what that means.

"Foreign drivers are particularly bad in their blind adherence to satnav and need to improve their behaviour."

The first question that came to my mind was, isn’t there one of those universal road signs that means "Low Bridge"?   And apparently, there are:

I own a car that has a satnav system in it, and I’m here to tell you it’s a lovely little bit of technology.  And I’m someone who Never had trouble with maps.  I love reading maps.  A favorite pastime of mine since I got paid vacation is to browse my big road Atlas like it’s a Christmas toy catalog.   But for helping me navigate large, snarly highway interchanges in unfamiliar territory, or guiding me to a specific address when I have to be someplace at a certain time, the satnav system is really handy.  Even so, if I saw it telling me to drive into a creek or make the next left onto a set of railroad tracks, I wouldn’t do it.  I’d probably just frown and think to myself, well this part of the map needs a little work. 

But that’s because I understand the technology from the inside out.  It’s not some kind of mysterious magic to me.  To me it’s only a computer program manipulating pixels on an LCD screen.  I may not know the details of how that particular program works, but I can build a general idea of how it’s probably doing it in my head.  I know what it is that it’s telling me and, just as importantly, what it isn’t telling me.  But more importantly, probably, I know what all computer professionals know about computers: garbage in equals garbage out.  It didn’t take me long after I got the Mercedes, to realize that just because its nav system is telling me there’s a gas station two miles ahead of me, that doesn’t mean that there really is a gas station two miles ahead of me.  It might be there was one there at one time, when the map was being made, but now it’s abandoned.  Or it might never have been there at all to begin with.  At some point, all the information in one of those satnav systems had to be put into it by a human.  And if the human got it wrong, the computer will happily feed you the wrong information just as though it was good information.  And not even ask for thanks, because it’s just doing its job.

I know this.  I have to keep reminding myself that to other people, computers seem a tad mysterious and maybe even a bit creepy.  You can’t see a program running.  The computer just sits there and then the next thing you know it’s displaying something on the screen.  Maybe it’s what you asked for.  Maybe it’s something like this…

And a lot of people, seeing that, wouldn’t curse the lazy ass programmer who wrote that lousy, utterly worthless error message, but just sit there and let their computer make them feel stupid and they’re not.  The computer knows something I don’t…  No…the computer doesn’t know anything.  It’s just a machine. 

I know a lot of people feel this way about computers:

Everyone always wants new things. Everybody likes new inventions, new technology. People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake. And to me, the choice is easy.
-Michael Scott, The Office

But this is as silly as saying that skin will never be replaced by clothes.  We are not our technology, but our technology is us.  Technology does not dehumanize us.  That’s trope.  A stone ax is technology.  A plow is technology.  A book is technology.  To say that humans are tool makers misses it a tad.  Tools are the visible part of the human soul.  They are embodiments of our thoughts, our feelings, our innermost selves.  They are art.  All technology, is art.  The masters of a craft, the ones who make the best, most useful, most enduring tools, are the ones who understand this.  In the way that output is only the visible part, the part you can see, of the running computer program, the things humans make, our tools, our machines, our buildings, our works of art, are embodiments of the inner, essential human nature every generation leaves behind in its wake.  Whether it’s an arrowhead, a cuckoo clock or a satnav system, their nature is our own.  And as the saying goes "There’s nothing as queer as folk".

Computers are something humans came up with, to help with tasks that humans wanted to do.  They’ve become ubiquitous because the basic technology is so damn versatile.  Trust it where you can verify that it’s working properly and not when it hands you something you can plainly see with your own two eyes is crap.  It’s just a machine.  It’s judgment cannot replace yours because it doesn’t have any judgment.  It’s just a machine.  In his poem, The Secret of the Machines, Rudyard Kipling wrote…

Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,
It will vanish and the stars will shine again,
Because, for all our power and weight and size,
We are nothing more than children of your brain!

When the road and the nav system disagree, believe the road.  If the computer directs you to go jump in a lake, it’s not being malicious, and you don’t have to do it.  It’s not working right.  Go find the programmer and make them fix it.