My wife and I wanted to visit the Riverside photography
museum, seventy miles away.
During this time there was a 50-50 chance of a hotel
call, but only half require a visit. Our luck didn’t hold, and my phone rang
after forty miles; someone was vomiting, not a visit I can stall. When I asked
directions to the address from my iPhone, it claimed no such location existed.
Since this was an insurance call, the patient was not an English-speaker. She
had phoned the insurance office in Miami whose dispatcher (also not a native English speaker)
phoned me. Addresses often become garbled.
I called the patient’s number and heard a busy signal,
always a bad sign on today’s phones. I was forced to call the insurance number,
spending a few minutes on hold before reaching a different dispatcher who spent
several minutes researching before turning up the correct address.
Then the iPhone GPS worked its magic, laying out a very
specific route to an obscure area near Long Beach thirty miles away. While I
took care of the patient, she looked up a nearby restaurant on an iPhone App.
We ate lunch and returned home.
Two days later we repeated the drive, this time
successfully. Most photography museums are art galleries, but Riverside’s is
part of the University of California, so it delivers large dose of history with
displays of old cameras and old photographs. Driving home with the rush hour
approaching, I kept an eye on the iPhone GPS, marveling at its accuracy at
predicting freeway jams.
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