# The little Garmin that couldn’t. ## Early days At one time, believe it or not, mobile phones and cars didn’t provide built-in mapping and GPS. Instead, you had to purchase a standalone GPS device - like a Garmin - and mount it some way or another to your dash. I’ve always held a fascination for knowing where I am. Any time I take a photo, I make sure to have GPS tracking turned on. Whenever I’m in a taxi, I get out my mobile and watch our progress. When I’m on vacation, I like to zoom way out and see where I am relative to the country and the world. When I’m not with my boys, I like to use Find My Friends to see where they are, just to feel connected and cozy. But I digress. ## Deeply confused So we ended up buying this low-end Garmin GPS for our car. It was cheap and slow, and from the fonts I could tell that it was based on [Windows CE](https://www.howtogeek.com/703977/what-was-windows-ce-and-why-did-people-use-it/) - a slow and clumsy mobile operating system from before the days of iOS and Android. One day I was on the way to the home of a research participant somewhere south of San Francisco, and came upon a cloverleaf interchange. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ve got my trusty GPS to direct me to my destination!” ![[■-the-little-garmin.png]] So up we went, around the first lobe (1) of the clover leaf. And then it directed me to take the second lobe (2), effectively making a U-turn in my route. “Ok,” I thought, “perhaps it’s some sort of workaround for one-way streets.” And then it directed me to take the third lobe (3), which if you’re still following along, was the equivalent to taking a right-hand turn before I ever entered the cloverleaf in the first place. “That’s odd,” I thought to myself, “but I trust the technology!” So I continued. And once again, the GPS directed me to take the next lobe of the cloverleaf (4) - returning me to my original path. And then the GPS screen went dark, as it crashed and restarted to a blank “Where would you like to go?” prompt. I like to think that it got lost, embarrassed, and ashamed. ∎