When GPS Goes Wrong...

I wanted to share a funny story of what happened about a week ago. Backstory: my dad has been driving for Werner for a little over a year now, and I am scheduled for school starting November 4. I went out on the road with my dad last Saturday to check it out and help him a little bit...it won't be the same experience as mine, since he is on a dedicated account and has to unload at all the stores he stops at while I will be driving OTR , but it's better than nothing!

Anyway, we were driving through San Antonio on the way to store #3 for the day. He got started pulling out of the parking lot and I was plugging the next address into his GPS (a nice Garmin model for truckers...not the cheapo 4-wheeler kind). It took a little bit...the address was, according to the paperwork, on "Old Hwy 90". I tried that in many different formats and couldn't find it, so he told me to just try using Hwy 90. For safety's sake, he plugged the address into his Qualcomm too, and it came up with Old Hwy 90 sure enough. They both pointed in the same direction so we felt OK, but he was following the Qualcomm just because it had the right address as far as we knew.

We got about 10 minutes down the road following the Qualcomm, and I took a look just to see if maybe the address was formatted weird, and I did notice something weird...the ZIP code shown on the Qualcomm was not the same ZIP code that was on the Garmin. I grabbed the paperwork and took a look, and sure enough we were headed for an address in a totally different ZIP code. Uh-oh! I told Dad about it, but we were already committed so we crossed our fingers and kept going. A few minutes later it said we were nearing our destination and we started getting nervous because there was no store in sight...we took the final turn and came around a curve and were suddenly slap-bang in the middle of a housing subdivision. Phooey.

OK, no biggie, time for "take 2" as they say in Hollywood. Luckily, the road we were on took us straight back out to a main road, and we started following the address on the Garmin, which was the correct ZIP code but was just regular Hwy 90, not "Old Hwy 90". It looked a little more promising, but as we approached the destination we saw a giant empty field with a little bitty junkyard in the middle of it. Sigh...to move from Hollywood to baseball...strike 2.

He pulled over on the side of the road and was just about to call the store and ask where they were, but I had a hunch...we had passed a road sign for "Old Hwy 90" a couple of miles back, and I knew it had to be in the GPS somehow. So he grabbed it and played with it for a few minutes, and finally found an entry for "Old US-90 Hwy". Gee, why didn't we think of typing it like that. Good grief.

Well, to make a long story longer, that address worked. We got to the store only a couple of hours late, and still made it to the last store of the day and home before his 11 hours ran out. It's great to have 2 GPS units to confirm each other, but sometimes everything goes nuts and you just want to punch the people who programmed them.

I personally am counting down the days till I can bid the cubicle-and-phone world goodbye and head off to school. Until then, safe journeys!

Where would we be without technology?

I still have not mastered those GPS thingies. I had a Rand Mcnally and that was it. And a dumb dispatcher. And talk about being out of route! Oh Lord!

Good thinking though. That is something you have to do a lot of. Thinking. It hurts sometimes, but bot does it get you out of a pickle. Have you ever tried to back out of a pickle? It's cucumbersome.

Man, weather forecasting and GPS navigation are two complex systems that have a long, long way to go and I don't see either one of them getting where we'd like them to be anytime soon.

Check out Google Maps anytime you're looking for a place, and never hesitate to call for directions. What I used to do is use various sources (like you guys were) to try to locate a place. If I could get two or more sources to agree then I knew there was a good chance the directions were right. So I'd:

1) Call the customer to get directions

2) Use the atlas if it was helpful

3) Use my GPS

4) Use Google Maps and Google Earth

5) Check the Qualcomm for directions

If at least two of those seemed to match up I figured it was probably ok.

But I highly recommend calling every pickup and delivery for directions because so many times there are low bridges, restricted routes, truck entrances, construction problems, and all sorts of important details you'll need to know that often times will not show up on any of your other sources.

And one last thing I used to do was look for a place to get turned around. You never know when you're going to miss a place or be re-routed due to construction or whatever. The last thing in the world you want to do is head off in some unknown direction hoping to God you can find a place to get turned around.

Oh, and one of the big advantages to using Google Maps and Google Earth is to check out the place you're going to so you can see the layout of the parking lot around the building. So many times I've found multiple entrances to a place and often times you can tell from the satellite view which is the truck entrance. You can also make an educated guess sometimes as to whether or not there's overnight parking there or close by. Those are a big help.

When I used to take trips in my car I soley relied on my GPS. Now working with a company that doesn't have gps nor do they plan routes and with me having a car gps I rely on my map and those big green signs to get me where im going as well as local directions from shippers. Dont trust your gps. It isnt hard to navigate the country the good ol fashion wsy