The number of worse place falls sharply when you happen to find yourself directed by your Garmin GPS system to an unmade and increasingly hazardous woodland lane.
Robert Jones, a driver from Doncaster, knows what I mean. He blamed his satnav for leaving his car perched on a cliff edge in Todmorden, where he says he ended up after he believed repeated assurances that he was on a road and not a steep, narrow footpath.
Now most of us can tell a steep, narrow footpath, and indeed a rough mountain track, from a road without needing confirmation from a voice on a machine. Indeed, the police could find little sympathy for Mr Jones, chucking a careless driving charge at him.
But somehow, I had assumed that my detour was a genuine short - and I mean short - cut that would lead swiftly back to a road, doubtless saving many km. I was already on a very narrow, though made up, road which relied at many points of passing places, so it was not as if the immediate change was enormous.
And as the track continued, I kept telling myself - as the voice kept telling me - that the next left or right turn would deliver me back on to asphalt.
Unfortunately, my GPS regards bends as turns and while there were plenty of those, there were no turns. The screen was by now informing me that I was on a road sans revêtements but I'd already worked that out (it had probably said so all along, but looking at the VDU while driving seems to defeat the purpose of having voice prompts).
The distances to what, it appeared, might be exits on to proper surfaces, seemed to vary with each message.
Eventually, as the road ahead worsened and I feared for the safety of my little Clio on it, I gave up, reversed gingerly up the hill and made a U-turn at a slightly wider spot I'd noticed on the way down. It was a slow, painful return to where we'd started from, but never have I been so relieved to come across a country lane too narrow to fit more than one vehicle.
It still seems more my fault than Garmin's, since my eyes were functioning quite normally and I should have turned back almost straight away. It was just that slightly dozy confidence it is possible to feel when guided by the firm, knowing tones of vocal prompts.
But then, didn't such a prompt also once send me the wrong down a one-way street in Florence?
Perhaps you have your own GPS horror tales - or even an explanation for why I sometimes lose the clear, elegant BBC (old BBC, that is) female voice and hear instead, without having changed any settings, directions in slow, monotonous Estuary English (the male Francophone version is even worse, offering the direst pronunciation I have encountered outside of first-form French lessons in Bishop Auckland). Surely not just the battery in need of a mains re-charge?
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