Lost and found

Hi. I’m Jeff, and I’m a GPS addict.

And no, that’s not a hip new street drug, although frankly a hardcore drug addiction would only be incrementally more embarrassing. GPS stands for exactly what you think it does: Global Positioning System, that handy little device that tells me when I’m close to home, and when I’m about to drive off the Main Street bridge into the Saco River. Which, considering my driving habits, happens more often than you’d think.

If this was a casual, on-again, off-again romance, I’d be fine with it. Using a GPS to get somewhere isn’t an inherently shameful activity. If I want to get to someone’s house in the middle of Bar Mills, the only other way I’m getting there is if I hitch a ride on the back of a wise, talking falcon ripped from the pages of an acid-inspired Tolkien fantasy. Way more fun than GPS, but you don’t find talking falcons next to the Guitar Hero controllers at Best Buy.

Shame enters the picture due to my over-reliance on the little satellite unit, without which I’d have a hard time locating my living room. Men, traditionally, have seen themselves as Masters of Thing-Finding, gifted through years of evolution with the ability to locate stuff by an infallible inner compass; when Lewis and Clark set out for the Pacific Coast in 1804, one pictures Lewis saying, “Ask for directions? Why, you buffoonish tallywhacker! I’ve totally got this!”

This inner compass, of course, is a fiction as fanciful as unicorns and Ewoks. Boastful pride is the reason why, in the days of yore, maps were often crumpled and tossed into the backseat, forgotten amidst a sea of gas station receipts and empty two-liter bottles of Orange Crush.

What the GPS did was allow men the luxury of stress-free navigation without infringing on a misplaced sense of independence. The reason is simple: The GPS is a device. Men love devices. If you’re looking for a gift for your husband/boyfriend/parole officer/whoever, all you have to do is get him something shiny that plugs into an outlet and makes a whirring noise. Screens are a bonus, and you’ll get extra brownie points for buying a gadget that talks to him in the soothing monotone of a soul-dead Lebanese prostitute.

When GPS technology became affordable for everyday schlubs like me, it allowed the directionally-challenged to conceal their weakness, much as Donald Trump conceals his scalp by covering it with dried seaweed and pocket lint.

Good thing, too, because being lost in a strange land can be an unsettling experience. A few years ago, before the age of digital helpers, I drove to Portland with a former girlfriend to attend a high school graduation. Portland is a city in desperate need of a subway system; its webwork of one-way avenues and labyrinthine side streets is the perfect setting for a “Where’s Waldo” tableau – one in which the stripe-shirted Waldo is found weeping in an alleyway in the Old Port, half-hidden by booze-juiced college frat boys. Our journey to the Merril Auditorium was so riddled with missed turns and retraced steps that for a while it seemed like we would perish right in the heart of downtown, probably in front of a coffee shop with a name like “The Bearded Scribbler.”

You don’t want to get lost when you’re taking your girlfriend somewhere. It does not result in copious smooches. We made the best of a bad situation, and made it to the graduation with roughly a nanosecond to spare. But when we walked up to the entrance, we bore empty, gape-mouthed expressions more commonly associated with trauma victims and Pauley Shore.

Had the situation been different – if we’d had the luxury of a little pocket robot to help us out – we’d have had time to spare. And time is really the biggest benefit. With the hours I’ve saved by admitting defeat and buying a dash-mounted unit for my car, I could do something really worthwhile, like teach a child to read, or see how many marshmallows I can fit in my mouth.

We often rely on technology when we shouldn’t. Math, for example. Calculators are great when we’re trying to figure out the square root of 121, but if you’re adding together two double-digit numbers, it’s probably better to just work it out in the margins of the nudie magazine you keep in your desk drawer. A little brain exercise may not be as fun as, say, eating a box of nails, but like vegetables, it’s good for you. The math, not the nails.

But it’s hard to know where to draw the line with GPS technology – it’s a convenience and a crutch. Using it to navigate a complex and unknown city like Boston qualifies as an appropriate use; I’ve talked to Vietnam vets who had experiences less traumatic than driving on Boylston after a Sox game. I, however, use it to mark the exact locations of buildings on Route 1 in towns I kinda know. That’s a bit much.

Manly thing-finding men might shake their heads at that, but at this point, I hardly care. I’ve been a rate in a maze my whole life – and it’s nice to finally find my way to the cheese.

Although I still want a talking falcon.