My garmin is now a night-light

I'm so mad!

Fewer than 12 hours ago, I loved my new garmin nuvi. I'm new to D.C. and I don't have a great grasp of geography, so having a tiny box to tell me where to go is fantastic. It's like being in a relationship but without all that inconvenient sex. Plus, I can learn my way around without the usual adventures where you end up driving around West Baltimore with the doors locked, for instance.

Then, at 2:30 AM or so, on my drive back from NYC (where the Garmin gamely took me this morning) it stopped doing anything at all. I'd been getting goofy messages from it earlier. Like it told me that it was running low on battery and would be shutting down now, thanks very much - despite being all plugged into the cigarette lighter and whatnot. Still, I pulled over and unplugged it, plugged it back in again, and we chalked it up to miscommunication.

Then, just as I get to the tricky part of the trip home; the part near my new place; the part of the trip that is neither entrenched in long-term memory, nor a variation on "stay on I-95", the little bastard up and dies. It showed nothing on the screen and was basically a night-light as shown above.

I muddled my way out after getting off the highway to look for a gas-station, finding instead a spot that looked like a cross between a state park and a CIA emplacement. I tried to reboot the Garmin, by, you know turning it off and on again, but that didn't take because it wouldn't turn off! I've left it on the floor now in the hopes that it's battery will in fact die during what little's left of the night.

I'm home now, no thanks to the Garmin. I'm pissed off to have spent an extra half-hour dragging my sorry ass around the greater D.C. area when I should have been sleeping. I've learned two things: First, I should have 2-D maps in the car just in case. Second, GPS systems need to have better redundancy. Maybe not a lot of them are being used at 2:00 AM when it's hard to find someone to give you real directions, but the point is that sometimes they are. If your product does something potentially very important and its failure can strand a user, then it shouldn't fail.