by Tracey (Wed Jun 10, 2009)
My husband and I don't argue much, but the one major pitfall in our marriage seems to happen in the car. I daresay we aren't the only couple in the world with this issue.
Even though I pride myself on being better at map-reading than the stereotypes would have it, he is always so damned impatient. He expects me to open a street directory or map, and to know exactly where we are, and if we need to turn, or take an exit off a freeway. Instantly. What does he think I am? A GPS? When I can't calculate it all in a split second, he grabs the map in frustration, and there are raised voices.
So I shouldn't have been surprised when he finally bought a SatNav for the car. I was never fussed with the idea; there's a little bit of the Luddite in me, despite my love of computers and the net. To me there's just something inherently weird about blindly obeying a computerised voice. But the first time he set it up in our car for one of our holiday trips down the highway, he was like a kid at Christmas. We knew the way but he just had to test it out.
Before we'd made it as far as our local town, his new toy was already getting on my nerves. ‘Continue for (so many) kilometres' the voice would intone - every ten kilometres! When you are travelling around 500 kilometres, that's a lot of computer voice invading your life.
He took a few ‘personas' for a test drive, and immediately rejected all of the male voices. He chose ‘Karen'. She was Australian too, and she pronounced ‘kil-oh-metre' the correct way, in his opinion. Karen. Hmmmph. I swear that every time I started to say something she'd interrupt. Pretty soon I was yelling ‘shut up!' at a gadget. He thought I was overreacting, but when we picked up our teenage daughters, it didn't take long to get some moral support. Within a few kilometres they'd dubbed her ‘Interrupting Bitch' (what can I say? They watch too much ‘House'.)
My husband was undeterred though. On that trip he was determined to prove how good she - it - was. Yes, she did manage to navigate us to a few places, and a couple of times she showed off by calculating our estimated time of arrival almost to the minute. She would tell him where to go, and he'd follow meekly, like a lamb, without question. He never once raised his voice at her, even when she got it wrong or took more than 15 seconds to get her bearings. He was smitten, and even though I had the backup maps, I was sidelined.
But we hadn't even made it home on that first trip before her true colours began to show. She brought up a route that made no sense to me (with a map on my lap, and more of a sense of the bigger picture). We overrode her instructions to ‘Turn Right' a few times, but she played it cool, and kept recalculating till eventually she capitulated to the route I had chosen. I suspected she had been trying to lead us astray, but my husband would hear none of it.
She's started getting more reckless and stupid, though. Recently her ETA for a Sydney to Melbourne trip (around 900km) was more than an hour out. She made the same huge error on the way back. I don't know what her ulterior motive is, but I'm definitely suspicious.
My husband takes her with him on solo trips too, of course. I have to admit I was blithely ignorant of this until recently he became more brazen. ‘Wot time eta?' I once texted, and he replied 'Karen reckons...' Karen?! It caught me off-guard at first. Who the hell was Karen?
The kids had to remind me; the Other Woman.
A friend suggested that maybe I should accept her in our marriage. ‘Not fighting over map-reading might have benefits in other areas', she winked. I'm not so sure - now I'm the one doing the yelling. (And he gets very irate when he realises I've gagged her... I mean ‘disabled the volume.')
Perhaps I can learn to live with her in our lives. Maybe I can try to humour his infatuation.
But if I find her in bed with him, she's toast. And so is he.
