Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details.No technology can help those who are directionally challenged By J. G. Fabiano I have been lost most of my life. I am not talking about being spiritually or emotionally lost. I am suffering through a disorder only understood by the directionally challenged. I've had this problem all of my life. My mother told me when I first learned to crawl I would wander around the living room seemingly trying to discover all there was to discover. In reality I was trying to figure out not only where I was but where I was supposed to go. As a young boy I loved baseball. The basic problem was I never could find the field. My father would take me most of the time because even though the field was only a few blocks down the road there were some corners I had to turn and inevitably I would never make the right ones. I once missed a play-off game because my parents sent me out early before the game and told me they would catch up to me when the game started. Needless to say I ended up at the police station waiting for my terrified parents to take me home. Driving was something my community should have never let me do. All this did was expand the area in which I could get lost. On my first solo I was supposed to pick up some groceries for my mother. Even though I thought I knew where the store was the ice cream I picked up basically settled to the bottom of the bag before I was able to find myself home. College was a nightmare for me because I was now responsible for finding where my classes were. High school was not a problem because I stayed in one building and I was able to follow my classmates to my next class. I clearly remember my first day when I was supposed to go to a freshman orientation at the student union. After I wandered around the campus for about a half an hour once even venturing out of the campus grounds I asked someone where the Union was. To my dismay he asked me which one. Needless to say I was never oriented that day. It took me through my sophomore year to feel comfortable at my school. It wasn't that big and there were plenty of landmarks to go by but whenever I had to be somewhere at a specific time my mind had the tendency to shut down. Maybe it was for fear of experiencing that same feeling I had when I was a baby in the middle of my living room. I actually attempted a short road trip with some friends before I graduated. We were supposed to enjoy a weekend in Upstate New York. I even bought a map for the trip. Of course me reading a map is like a fish trying to climb a tree. I never could figure out what the different colors meant on the map. I also could never understand how the number of the road changed in the middle of the map or how anyone could figure out how to make a right or left turn at a certain road that never appeared to me on the map. On this particular trip I had to drive by myself because of a late class. To make a long story short I ended driving through six states, got there twelve hours late, and you guessed it, ended up at the police station at which time my friends made me follow them to the cabin. They never allowed me to drive by myself again. I am fortunate to have married a woman who knows I have this affliction. She never lets me drive by myself unless she is confident I can find my way home or I have a cell phone I can use to find out where I was. We always give ourselves hours more than it takes to get to our destination because inevitably we will wander through back roads and mysterious highways until we are lucky enough to get to where we were supposed to be. Being a teacher I like to get involved with my students after school. My students and I once founded a golf team. Since I played the game pretty well it seemed a good fit. The only problem was because the team was small I had to drive a van to the golf courses. I was fortunate because most of the time my team knew where they were going. But, once they did not. Needless to say I wandered through the state for hours looking for something that was supposed to be easy to find. After awhile my team told me they were hungry and we should stop our search for the golf course in order to find some place to eat. I agreed and started looking for a McDonalds Restaurant. Needless to say I found the golf course. I thought my life was saved last Christmas because my sympathetic wife bought me a GPS machine. This machine promised to tell me; yes I did say tell me where I was supposed to go and how to get there. I was thrilled. The first few times I used it proved to be effective because the voice of the machine told me where to turn and what the name of the road was. I was so confident I decided to visit my daughter, who lived in South Boston, by myself. The trip started out well with the soft sounding voice of the GPS telling me where to turn and how far it was to where I had to turn again. The problem began when I hit the streets of Boston. The pleasant sounding voice of the machine started to squeal out commands of turning here and then there before I had the capacity to understand what the heck it was talking about. In fact, I am sure the voice from the machine changed its tone and started to get cross with me. Another nice thing about this newest of technologies is it corrects your mistake if you make a wrong turn. It tells you it is're-calculating'. After seven recalculations I decided to call my daughter in order to have her husband find me and thus lead me to their home. My no-longer-so-loved son-in-law told me I was the first person he ever knew who got lost using a GPS system. I have been lost most of my life and, since this is a reality, I may as well enjoy it. The End.
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