That reminds me of one time my wife had her phone’s navigation app running while we were driving to my mom’s house. There is a street in the neighborhood called St. Catherine St. “Turn right onto Street Catherine Street.”
Rather mundane, but I spent three weeks on a road trip with my wife, sister and brother-in-law who both kept their fucking phones on for most of the trip. Siri really gets on my nerves in the first place, and to have to listen to her tell me to turn right in .7 tenths of a mile for most of a month got real old, real fast. For the most part, I know where I am when I’m driving, and I like to visualize my relationship with the local geography with a real map (oh yeah, we got laughed at for that at a few comfort stops). BIL is a sailor, and that stuff is very useful on the water, but turn it off when I don’t want to hear it and don’t need it. They seemed to find it comforting… Antelope Freeway 1/8th mile… Antelope Freeway 1/16th mile… Antelope Freeway 1/32nd mile… Antelope Freeway…
I was in Poland last year, rented a car & a Garmin. I don’t get Polish; it’s the same letters that we use but pronounced very differently.
Neither does the Garmin. I almost crashed the car from laughing so hard the first time it told me to, “Turn left at…the street ahead.” Instead of butchering the name it’s like it just thought, “F*** it, I gots no clue.”
Actually they are & I found that out an interesting way.
Every GPS I ever used had height/altitude as part of your location/distance traveled. Because they are designed for cars & following roads, they programmed out altitude as the Nuvi always assumed you were on the ground. They also made a handlebar clip so you could mount the Nuvi to bicycle handlebars which I got since I was taking my bike up with the balloon & was going to race back to the launch field. As we approach an intersection below I hear, “Turn left”. I look at the altimeter (800’) & then look down (yup, the altimeter seems right). I don’t think I’ll be turning here, I’ll wait until we’re back on terra firma.
Funnily enough, I used to live in Micronesia (on the island of Pohnpei). The thought of the GPS saying “Turn right on Federated States of Micronesia” cracks me up.
Reading the stories about mispronunciations, have to hijack my own thread to say we (my kids and I) have had a barrel of laughs speaking intentional gibberish into a phone to hear what it thinks we’re saying.
Where does it send you if you try saying “Mixolydian”? 
The irritating adventure occurred while traveling from Ventura county up to South Lake Tahoe. Our hosts kept saying, “It’s easy: Just take the 5 north to the 50 and head east. You’ll get there.” On the other hand, my wife insisted on programming our destination into the Garmin and, since I’d bought it for her as a Christmas gift, who was I to complain that she wanted to use it?
The gadget did a fine job for several hours. Then, for some reason, it directed us off the freeway, over the bridge crossing the freeway, off again, back over, and along our original route – past the Highway Patrol station in the middle of nowhere. When it directed us off the freeway at the same ramp a second time, I ignored it and kept heading north. We figured the CHP had hijacked the satellite signal and was directing suspicious-looking cars back around so they could take a better look… :eek:
Hours later it directed us off the Interstate, through a tiny town, down a two-lane highway, and along another State highway to connect again with the Interstate. We have no idea why it did that.
On the way home, we left the GPS off, took the 50 West to the 5 and headed south. The trip home took four hours less than the trip up.
When I originally bought the Garmin for my wife, I saw that it had several language options plus a way to record your own set of terms in case their available stock wasn’t what you needed – Urdu, Hindi, or Eritrean aren’t obscure enough for you?:dubious:
So I developed a list of standard Garmin terms and spent about two hours recording my equivalent phrases, then installed them on the GPS as “Grestarian’s Soothing Voice” pack. Most of the terms were pretty normal since there’s not much you can do with “mile” or “miles” as portions of larger phrases. However, I had some fun recording a few of the instructions in a panicky voice, “Oh no! You missed it! Turn around! Turn around! Go back! Go back! Go back!” and “For gods’ sakes will you just turn right here? No I mean left! Turn LEFT here! LEFT!” and “Go right here – go RIGHT right here – right right right right right! Did you signal?” and “Stop! Stop! Stop! You’re here already! Now just get out, will ya?”
By the second day, she had figured out how to change the navigator’s voice all by herself. 
–G!
I was heading to the company office in Casper, WY, a few years ago. I had a rental car with GPS because I’d never been to Casper before. I was following the directions religiously and the GPS sent me to the parking lot of the Casper Mall. Clearly that wasn’t where I was going, so I shut off the GPS, drove around a bit to allow it recalibrate and tried again. Boom - right back to the Mall. By this point I was getting tired of the uppity Brit chick voice on the GPS and decided to change it to generic male voice. Again, I drove around a bit and tried the routing again. Darned if the GPS didn’t get it right this time! (cue Twilight Zone theme)
Either I had the world’s most misogynistic GPS (the female voice sent me to the Mall, while the male voice sent me to work), or the aliens were tampering with the satellite that day.
While driving across the Yukon my GPS kept insisting I turn right in 300m.
The Yukon is so undeveloped, you can drive for ages and never pass a crossroad or see any human development. The highway is basically a single thread across a landscape that’s essentially unchanged since the last ice age.
Turn right? Really? So, plow through the forest for 1,000km until I hit the ocean, I suppose?
Have to imagine that would be fun in Wales :D.
Not really a horror story, but I got my first GPS about 15 years ago when they were still new, a Garmin Street Pilot III. The very first time I used it was to go to a destination that normally required me to go one exit on the Capital Beltway. The GPS routed me in the opposite direction, asking me to 66 miles around the circle in the other direction to get to my exit. Fortunately I didn’t blindly obey and it recalculated once it figured out which I was going.
I never got bad directions again, though.