The SAT NAV and how to use it!

First of all I suppose a sat nav is a satellite navigation tool and I don't know how to work it at all - so I got you here under false pretences.

Neither does my wife – in fact I don't even know if she has ever noticed them on the dashboard of the mini cabs we use. She can, however, do three crosswords a day, reads The Guardian, The Standard and The Metro from cover to cover, watches all the political programmes on television and knows more about antiques than the average Antiques Road Shows' experts both here and in America. - (notice I never say the States as I think it's one of the worst tags I know and only slightly bettered by SAT NAV ) and strangely enough she seems to win all the little games like Trivial Pursuits and the like we get to play every ten years or so – we don't play games.

There is the dreaded sat nav above and here are all bits you need to work it:

I don't know what all those things are for but I would bet that one of them is a battery or something you connect to a battery somewhere.

This is a fact: when you use a sat nav you are not using your brain at all. Also, a well known fact, is that drivers' of black cabs in London have bigger or larger, whichever adjective you want to use and is proper, hippocampuses than the average yogi.

The hippocampus is the organ in the brain that does all the work – how do I know this? Because my favourite programmes on TV are University Challenge and Mastermind – so why wouldn't I know.

You think I know bugger nothing don't you – I tell you I know bugger all!!

Anyway:

It does all the work because it is, in essence, the memory, the organ in charge of spatial matters and emotion. So when the mini cab driver asks you where you are going and then asks for your postcode you know they won't be using their hippocampus. 

He or she will have turned it off and they'll be relying on the sat nav and singing to themselves One Day, Two Day, Soon it will be Pay Day!

And other sensible rhymes and couplets.

When I was sixteen I was in the army cadets – as I've mentioned before the ACF not the CCF as that is for schools – and I rose to the dizzy height of sergeant and I used to teach map reading.

So I never used a sat nav as they hadn't been invented. I used a map, a prismatic compass and a protractor.

Here they are:

All you have to do is open the map; open the compass and place the map facing magnetic north, which you will see on the compass. Then look for two familiar or distinctive things – maybe two hills, if you are in town maybe a church and a bus station (but those would be easy so let's stick to the outback) – yes you wouldn't be able to use the sat nav miles from anywhere as your battery will run out.

So you see a hill – not very big, which means the contour lines on your map will be wide apart. Take a reading on that hill with the compass.

Then to the other way you see a steep hill and you find this on your map with the contour lines close together; take another reading.

So now you put your protractor on to the first reading and draw a line down the map at the reading on the protractor.

Then go to the second reading and do the same thing and where the two lines cross will be where you are standing. If you're in the Sahara Desert wait for the stars.

So when everything runs out, batteries, computers and people who know how to read maps all die, the world will be left with a load of robots.

And where does the word robot come from? How would I know – but it means slave and I think it comes from and yes I'm right:

Origin of robot

< Czech, coined by Karel Čapek in the play R.U.R. (1920) from the base robot-, as in robota compulsory labor, robotník peasant owing such labor.

I knew that as it was on a radio show recently.

I think you will know my point – every labour saving device can do nothing except help you to suffer from some kind of dementia.