Flipside

On the left, my photograph of a satellite when the Space Needle annoyingly wandered into shot, and on the right a satellite photograph of me when the attention seeking Space Needle again stumbled into the frame. Google Earth continues to rock my world.

Why Men Don't Listen To Women Reading Maps

Last year I was recommended by Tom Peters (well actually, when I say I, what I really mean is I and 200 other people sitting listening to Tom Peters talk) to read Why Men Don't Listen And Women Can't Read Maps.

It's a great read, funny and insightful without being too heavy.

"A woman knows her children's friends, hopes, dreams, secret fears, what they are thinking, how they are feeling. Men are vaguely aware of some short people also living in the house." (Extract from "Why Men Don't Listen And Women Can't Read Maps" by Barbara & Allan Pease)

Tom Peters referenced the book in his talk to make a point about the importance of women as an often overlooked yet highly valuable (and powerful) market demographic. In short, most advertising and commerce is designed and conducted with a male target bias. Tom says this is wrong, I agree.

Moreover, it says that men and women don't simply respond differently to things on a socially conditioned basis; like fluffy pink dolls stuff versus hard metallic blue gun/death stuff. We're biologically wired up differently. These differences manifest themselves in various ways, not least the propensity for men to not listen (mostly to women) and for women to be particularly bad at reading maps.

So, you'll forgive my wry smile when I caught myself the other day - for the umpteenth time I might add - failing to follow audible directions given to me by the female voice that sits inside the Satnav system in my car. Either I'll drift off in thought, be distracted by something or other and before I know it, I'm heading off in the wrong direction having completely missed or ignored the repeated audible directions like "Turn left in 200 yards" issued forth in a rather proper English accented female voice.

There's clearly some kind of karmic gender law that's being broken here. Either that, or sexy female voiced Satnav systems (until recently found mostly in big, butch cars for men) is a fantastically ironic in-joke.

Which I just got.

What Evil Lies At The End Of Holly Bush Lane?

My car has a satellite navigation computer which has helped me out on numerous occasions given my relatively limited knowledge of the local geography of southern England, having only lived here for a couple of years.

However, it's not 100% perfect. There are a couple of glitches as far as its understanding the entire length of the M1 motorway is concerned and it repeatedly instructs me to exit at the wrong junction every time I traverse north on the M1 from London, heading home.

Having said that I have learned to trust it more often than not, even when it appears to be sending me in the wrong direction or when my instinctive sense of direction would lead me another way. Most of the time 'Betty', as I like to call her, gets it right and she has saved me enormous amounts of time finding places I'd never find in a month of Sundays. But the other day she abused my trust and left me confused and more than a little spooked.

En route to a certain destination I found myself being guided by Betty down an increasingly odd sequence of twists and turns that contradicted my own sense of where we should have been heading. But as I said above, I've learned to trust her and I know to let her just lead the way and so that is what I did. Shortly afterwards we turned off the main road and entered Holly Bush Lane which was a single track road which and the further along it I travelled, the more off-road the conditions became. All signs of civilisation slowly drew back into the distance and a well weathered and beaten up old caravan appeared to my right and whilst it was in poor condition, it looked as if it was habitable; moreover its door lay ominously open, I thought.

I began to question the sense in continuing down what was an increasingly strange route but, trusting Betty, I decided to continue onwards. Such were the road conditions beneath me, I was barely able to move along more quickly than 5mph, weaving left and right, up and down through what seemed like a million pot-holes in the now dusty and increasingly more broken up track below.

Betty barked at me, "Straight On!" as her screen read "3/4 Mile" to the next turning instruction which very, very slowly then became "1/2 Mile" as we crept further and further down Holly Bush Lane.

All that stretched out in front of me was the same featureless dusty track with not a soul in sight and I noticed it was couched in ever-thickening bushes and trees that seemed to creep closer and closer to the centre of the track ahead of me. It was not a welcoming sight.

As the gravel crackled under my tyres as we drove towards the end of the lane I thought about what horrors would I find waiting for me at the end of Holly Bush Lane.

Images flashed across my mind of a lost community of savages, reminiscent of Mad Max's Thunderdome but populated instead by missing business executives who had also been tricked by their evil SatNav systems long before me, only to find themselves trapped forever in a SatNav black hole and forced to live off the land, sitting around from dusk to dawn in their Recaro bucket seats, hunched around a camp-fire for warmth, ravenous and waiting for the next hapless victim to arrive with the fresh promise of some half eaten sandwich crusts or perhaps a luxurious tin of boiled sweets in the glove compartment.

Or would I find hell on earth filled with burned out BMW's, Merc's and other tricked out executive cars, with their owners long since extracted and consumed by some evil force that lived off the fattened torsos of capitalist pigs and 800lb board-room gorillas.

Suddenly the trance that had consumed me lifted and in a flash I slammed on the brakes and the car skidded sharply to a halt, crunching the gravel beneath. "Straight On!" ordered Betty, in a tone that sounded more fraught than usual. There was only a 1/4 mile to go before the end of Holly Bush Lane. We sat motionless for a few moments before I slowly found the sense to reach out towards the SatNav Off button and push it in. My hands still shaking, I then fumbled for the gear stick, hurriedly selected reverse then headed back down the lane in the direction from which I had come.

But to this day I feel a calling, something is drawing me back to Holly Bush Lane and I'm curious to know what's down there, and maybe one day I'll find out or, if not me, then maybe whoever takes ownership of Betty after me. I should warn them about Holly Bush Lane.