Do you have an iPhone, iPad, GPS, or some other device includes a mapping program to help you get form point A to point B? How about that trip in which you used a program like MapQuest to provide directions? Well if you answered ‘yes’ to either of the above questions, beware of the bureaucrats who make changes, but fail to notify everyone involved. How many roads have multiple names because someone, somewhere decided to rename a section in honor of someone? The rub is, they often do not notify the proper people. The mapping programs remain ignorant of the change. This problem is not isolated to Santa Rosa County. It extends across the nation. One particular case involved a street called North Cove in a nearby county. Driving in was pretty easy until the last couple of steps on the MapQuest directions. North Cove could not be found. No problem, just break out the iPhone and its wonderful mapping program. It, too, suggested we turn onto North Cove, but could not identify the location of said roadway. Someone forgot to tell someone that the road in question was named Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard. After some tense moments we made the rest of the trip without a hitch. But it makes one wonder: where is all this technology going? WYSWYG (What You See is What You Get) might look familiar to some who studied computers and computer programming, but we have a new term, BGIBGO – (bureaucratic garbage in, bureaucratic garbage out.) To translate, whatever a bureaucrat puts in is what we get out and, far too often, it’s garbage. Try telling a friend where you live. If your house is on a street that has seen a name change, it could prove problematic, What if that job prospect ( for which you want to be early for an interview) is on a recently name-changed street? You may not make the interview at all. Technology is a super thing, but it is no better than what is fed into the machine. And it seems the more advanced we become, the more ways we find to screw things up. As a result, your iPhone, iPad, GPS, or MapQuest just might not compute.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Technology is wonderful (if info is correct)