We had just moved into our new
place, it was just before 7pm and pitch black. We were all tired and
hungry and surrounded by Ikea boxes and unpacked luggage.
I set Kristine’s phone to GPS,
with directions to Burger King and she set off to get dinner while I set
up the mattresses for the kids.
By the time I had the mattresses
set up and the doona and pillow covers on it felt like Kris had been
gone for a while. The Burger King was about 10 minutes away and I
expected her back long before I’d finished. But
still, she had her phone and would have called if there were any
issues.
I checked the time - 8pm. The
kids had school the next day and were starting to get tired and grumpy,
so I sent them to get through the shower and change into their pajamas.
Where was Kris? I resisted the urge to call
her – she could call me if she needed and was probably just stuck in a
massive queue at Burger King, or maybe having bit of a drive to explore
our new area and the kids and I were fine.
At 8:30pm I started pacing, I
picked up my phone to call, but then had to go split up a fight between
the kids, who were hungry and tired. I gave them their Ipads to keep
them occupied and then my phone rung. It was
Kris.
She was pretty upset and
explained that Googlemaps had crashed and kept issuing the same
direction to keep going straight ahead. She had picked up the Burger
King but then ended up getting completely lost. That might
be ok in Australia where we knew the area, but she was in a new
country, it was pitch black and raining and to make matters worse, she
couldn’t read the street signs for three reasons:
1)
They are not always lit well or at all so they can be difficult to see and read from the road,2) She hadn’t taken her glasses and most importantly,
3) They were all in Swedish.
Ok so that explained why she had
taken so long, but why hadn’t she just reset googlemaps and used it to
find her way back? Turns out that when she realized it had sent her too
far, she picked up her phone and started
to set the location when it ran out of batteries and turn off. She had
no phone charger and no idea where she was.
She drove for a little while
before seeing the Ikea sign in the distance. One thing to note in
Sweden is that often you don’t see much in the distance at night as
there is low-lying cloud of fog, so she was lucky here.
She managed to get to Ikea and remembered that MediaMart (where we
bought our TVs) sold car phone chargers. After pulling into the car
park, she ran to the door just in time to see them being locked. She
asked the security guard and he told her they were
just closing and she couldn’t enter
Kristine burst into tears at
this point (and justifiably so), so the security guard took pity on her
after she explained her situation and let her in. She grabbed a phone
charger, paid and returned to the car. The charger
she grabbed had a molded (rather than disconnectable) cigarette jack
connector rather than a USB plug and when she opened the centre console,
she saw that there were only USB jacks. Fortunately Kris remembered
there was a cigarette jack in the boot (as MediaMart
was well and truly closed by now) and she managed to get her phone
charged. From there she tried Googlemaps again but it crashed again.
That’s when I got the phone call.
By now it was 9pm, the 10 minute
trip to get takeaway had taken about 2 hours so far. It was too late
for the kids so I made them sandwiches and then while they were eating, I
got Kristine to set the phone on speaker
while I opened my (more stable) googlemaps and tried to direct her.
This didn’t really work too well initially as Kris needed to leave her
phone in the boot to charge and so it didn’t pick up her voice well and I
got a lot of static or missed words. Also
(as I mentioned above) she couldn’t readily read or pronounce the
street names so I was struggling to find where she was on my map. I was
getting “I’m on Nort*static*atan road” and the last thing you want to do
when someone is upset and worried is ask them
to repeat themselves four times. Eventually I remembered that the car
had a Bluetooth phone connection and got her to pullover and dock the
phone and that at least made it so we could talk clearly. But it didn’t
help the problem of where the hell she was.
I managed to find the street she was on, but I didn’t know which
direction she was heading as there were no landmarks or other signs.
Then there was the problem that the directions were to landmarks we
didn’t know or that were not easy to find on a googlemaps
screen.
Eventually after I was pretty
sure she was going the right way, she saw a police car on the side of
the road, pulled over and run up to the driver. We found out later that
the car was guarding Malmö Stadium where there
was a game vs Denmark going and they were concerned with terrorism
after the attacks in Paris. So really she was lucky that the officer
responded calmly to having a semi-hysterical woman screech to a halt and
charge at his car.
When she explained her situation
he was very sympathetic and gave her directions (pretty much to keep
going the way she was going – so my directions had been pretty good).
She arrived home at about 9:45pm with a bag
of ice-cold take-away and a deep abiding hatred of Googlemaps.
While we dined on microwaved
hamburgers (definitely not worth the 3 hour wait) we couldn’t help but
laugh and suggest that we need to not rely on technology so much and buy
a map.
Damn :( but the post has been read.
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