You wouldn’t think Mount Rushmore would be that hard to find. First, it’s a mountain. By definition, they tend to stick up out of the ground. Second, it’s got people carved into it—familiar people, people we see every time we fish in our wallets for cash to pay the McDonald’s drive-thru guy.
But it’s not as easy as you might think. Not when Siri’s feeling whimsical.
Siri, as you may know, is the kindly, professional digital personality of more recent iPhones, including my iPhone 5. I admittedly don’t talk with Siri much, and perhaps she was feeling neglected. Most of our conversations—almost all of which take place when I’m using the iPhone’s mapping function—are fairly one-way monologues. I type in an address, and Siri leads me, turn by turn, to my destination. And she’s typically very considerate.
But during our family vacation to South Dakota last week, Siri wanted to take us off the beaten path. Or, perhaps off the road and to a beaten path that might eventually lead to a cave full of direwolves.
The fam and I were staying in Rapid City, S.D., and were ready to make our obligatory pilgrimage to Mount Rushmore. But we didn’t know how to get there and, oddly, I didn’t have a map of the area with us. As the family’s official vacation architect, this was unusual: I do not like to be without a map. But in this case I wasn’t too worried about it. After all, I had my iPhone! An iPhone with a cool mapping feature! Paper maps, it would seem, are so 20th century.
So I handed my phone to my wife and she, presumably, asked Siri to direct us to Mount Rushmore.
I was not at all worried when Siri had us speed past a street that had several signs which said, “Mount Rushmore This Way!” and “Mount Rushmore Dead Ahead!” “These phones are great!” I said aloud. “It must know a shortcut!”
Granted, I was beginning to wonder just how “short” this shortcut was when we began winding our way through Rapid City suburbs and, eventually, into rugged sheep-herding areas. “Well, at least we’re seeing the area,” my daughter said.
But I had faith in modern technology. Sure, I had heard that some folks had had problems with the iPhone map app, particularly overseas—sometimes directing users not to the nearest Starbucks, but to the nearest alligator swamp. But all those bugs had been fixed, right? And, hey, we’re talking about Mount Rushmore! Again, mountain with people carved in it. Major tourist attraction. On all South Dakota license plates. Not hard to find.
After we bumped along a dirt road for a mile, which then dead-ended in the middle of a forest, I figured we might have a little problem. I grabbed the iPhone, looked at the map and found that it was happily telling us that we needed to walk the next 20 miles to our destination.
Admittedly, our problems might not have been Siri’s fault. Maybe we entered a typo into the search or accidentally picked the wrong set of directions. In fact, we used another iPhone—my son’s—eventually to get back on track. And, as you can see from the picture (that’s my family in front of the rather pale guys in the background), we did eventually get to where we hoped to get to … about two hours later than we’d originally planned.
But it was, from a Plugged In perspective, an interesting lesson.
We talk all the time here about how we need to be cautious when it comes to technology. All the doodads we have at our disposal can be nifty and fun and incredibly useful. And yet, they come with their own set of problems, too. They need not be moral or ethical problems. Sometimes, we can simply become a little over-reliant on technology to help us along. I’ve read that in the wake of ubiquitous GPS systems and hardly-ever-fail mapping apps, we’re losing our ability to read maps and remember directions. Why use precious brain cells on navigation when we’ve got apps that do the work for us?
But sometimes, even we Plugged In types need a little reminder.
Now, I’m not dumping my phone or deleting its map app. For the most part, it’s served me well. But this vacation, I learned a valuable lesson: As helpful and chipper as Siri often is, it’s never a bad idea to throw a real map into the glove compartment. Just in case.
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