Timothy Callahan

There’s a spider in my car!!

So, there I was, driving home, minding my own business when suddenly, out of nowhere, I see a spider, a huge one, walking down the window of my car. My first reaction was, 'oh, he's on the outside, he'll fall off.' then I looked at it closely and I realized, oh no, it's inside the car!!

Fun fact, I'm scared to death of all bugs. Okay, maybe not scared to death but I don't like them too much. The best way to hear me scream like a little girl is to be a bug, a large one, somewhere in my immediate vicinity.

I'm driving, there is no way for me to pull over to stop, and this spider is slowly walking down my windshield toward me. I'm carefully looking around the car trying to figure out if I can get the spider out of my car while still driving. Yeah, that wasn't going to work so I simply started talking to the spider. "Hello Spider, hope I'm taking you a place you want to go. Say, spider, can you please stay there. . .oh, you're moving again, that's okay I get it, I'd move too if I could . Okay, now you're near my rearview mirror and hey, where did you go? Okay, I can't see you now and you'd think that would be okay but really it's not cause when I could see you I'd know where you are, but now that I can't I'm afraid you might surprise me somehow. Where did you go anyway?"

For the rest of the ride I'm looking at the Windshield wondering where the spider went. I finally pull onto my street and park and only then do I see that the Spider decided to rest on my rearview mirror. I have a choice, leave it there and hope that it doesn't build a web in my car or try to get it out. I didn't really want to kill it, mostly cause it was kind of big and that would have been messy, or find a way to shoo it out.

I look around and find an old parking stub, an old Yahoo map I printed out, and a bunch of other junk. I really need to clean my car. I use the parking stub to sort of herd the spider onto the Yahoo map and, of course, it was then that the spider decided to jump, which caused me to jump and scream and leap out of the car! When I look back into the car, after making sure my heart was not, in fact, on the driver's seat, I see the spider was still on the Yahoo map (maybe he needed to know where he was going?)

I grab the paper and throw it out of my car and onto the ground. The spider fell out of the paper and then just sort of stayed there. Now, I really have a delema, step on it or let it go. I choose to let it go and watched as if scurried away.

It occurred to me, as I was writing this, that Spider in my car would make a great B-52's song! Can't you just hear Fred Schider singing:

There's a spider in my car, oh no!

A spider in my car, good golly!

How did it get there?

Where will it go?

A spider in my car, good god!

I hate it when technology fails me

This weekend I had a bad experience with my GPS. I'd like to blame the GPS, I really would and, in fact, it was partly the GPS's fault but I guess I should really just blame myself cause, well I stand by all the technology I love and I try not to see all the faults so when there is a fault I get very upset at myself for trusting it.

First of all I need to tell you how much I love my GPS. Before I bought it I got lost an awful lot. Not so much when I prepared myself for a trip, before my GPS I did manage to make it from Philadelphia to a lot of places far away, Ohio, Boston, Virginia, North Carolina, all without getting lost. I would go to Google maps, type in the address, print them up, study them a bit and I'd always be sure to have them next to me on my car seat so I could look at them while driving. Okay, never said it was a safe way to do it but when you don't have a co-pilot what else could you do? The only time I had a problem was when I was driving on a busy highway and had to slam on my breaks because I had been cut off. My directions went flying from the seat onto the floor and I couldn't reach them, at least not without stopping or causing an accident. Luckily I knew the exit and when I got off there was a gas station I was able to pull into.

I always resisted getting a GPS, not really sure why, maybe I thought getting one would be me giving up on trying to figure out how to get places, I'm not sure. The final nail in the coffin of if I should or shouldn't get one was when I got really lost while driving around Philly. I know Philly, I know it pretty well, or so I thought but I made a twenty minute drive into a 2 hour odyssey of trying to get back to a road that looked familiar! I finally found my way home but when I did I started looking for GPS systems because I never wanted to be that lost again. I finally got one at a good price and I haven't regretted. . .that is until Friday.

Me and my girl were supposed to get from Kutztown to Lakeview PA. The problem is the place, Cove Haven, didn't have an address the GPS recognized but the website had the GPS Decimal Coordinates so I figured that's good enough, even though I've never had to enter those before it didn't seem all the hard so I placed the Decimal Coordinates in the GPS and off we went!

Of course you can ask me, "didn't the website give you directions from where you were at?" The answer would be yes, the problem is I really wasn't sure which directions I needed to follow since the directions were all 'if you're coming from here, go this way, if you're coming from here go this way, if you're coming from her go this way' and I didn't know which one of those places matched from where I was coming from.

I should have just put the town into the GPS then called them from wherever it was I ended up, how big could the town have been? Nope, didn't do that cause I had the Decimal Coordinates!

Half way through the drive I started to get nervous. I had read the directions from different locations and most had me going to a certain highway but as I drove I didn't notice any signs for the highway. Oh well, my GPS has never let me down before! It might not take me the most efficient way possible (like going to my friends house it tends to take me way out of my way.) but it always gets me there.

The more I drove the more I worried. I didn't express my worry to my girl, why bother her, she was taking a nap anyway but I really should have pulled over to double check but, I had faith darn it!

It really wasn't until I made the turn into the housing development that I realized I was in the wrong place. I tried to figure out what I did wrong and the only thing I could think of it I simply placed the wrong Decimal Coordinates into the system because, even though we were off course we weren't really that far off course. I decided to put the town into the GPS and lo and behold I was about two hours of my way, I thought, I really stopped trusting my GPS now and that hurt me! I loved that thing and it betrayed me!

So, after figuring out where we were (thanks to my iPhone) I called the hotel and they gave me directions to the place, which is what I should have done in the first place!

Is there a lesson in all this? I don't know but if you find one leave a comment, I can use all the help I can get.