Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

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You've obviously never driven with someone from an older generation.

My dad when driving on the highway and the road veers in any way that is in any way not a BLATANTLY obvious exit: "What do I do? Which way do I go?"

Me: "It's fine dad, just keep left. That's the way the main highway is heading"

My dad when Google Maps suggests a route that isn't the most direct way possible: "Why is it telling me to go this way? That's not the fastest route."

Me: "Dad, the app knows about traffic conditions. There's probably a good reason why it's suggesting this way"

My dad when he knows that 4 hours a way there is a bridge or a tunnel that has incremental conditions: "We should look up to see if the bridge is busy so that we can decide now whether in 2 hours we will pick a different route"

All these notifications are SUPER important for a certain type of driver - an older generation that has trouble with letting go of trust, and will insist on giving you directions to their house instead of just telling you the address.

And all these notifications can be silenced (If you click on the Microphone in the app while in Navigation mode, there are 3 options - 1/ fully silent, 2/ all notifications, 3/ only important notifications)

~All our parents grew up without a handheld device giving them prompts every twenty seconds. You are being really arrogant by thinking an entire generation is less capable than anyone on here and “needs” that handholding more than “we” do.

I've worked as a 'professional' driver and I can tell you with certainty and a very large sample size that the only people who question Google Maps / Waze are Boomers.

Nobody under 50 ever so much as blinked an eye when I used voice recognition on my phone to start navigating to their address or the airport.

Boomers? "Google Maps doesn't know how to get to my house", "It makes you take X exit and that's ALWAYS slower" and so on and on.

They were always wrong. Google and Waze always knew where their house was, and showed a valid route to/from. Waze and Google Maps were always accurate to within a minute or two arrival-time-wise. Yet every time the Boomer in the back seat demanded a route change, they'd add 5-10 minutes to the trip time. I'd note the arrival time estimate, then note it going up with each turn the Boomer in the back seat made me take, and I'd note the final time, and it was always higher.

My dispatcher confirmed that drivers seemed to only complain about back-seat driving from boomers.

It was infuriating because I was not paid by time nor mileage, but trip, and sometimes I'd end up missing a shot at another trip I'd been lined up for.

Boomers were the only ones to insist on "helping" load or unload their luggage from the trunk...or supervising me / offering their opinion on how to best load. Or expressing doubt that I could not lift their luggage. And then express surprise when, shockingly, someone who spends all fucking day loading luggage in and out of the same car, is highly competent at it.

Boomers were the only ones to insist on "helping" the trunk lid auto-closer close. I'd push the button, start walking away, and the clown would stand there and press on the trunk lid (sometimes making the mechanism freak out, which would of course convince them that they were right, the mechanism needed their help.)

Not to mention that most older folks can navigate in places they are semi-familiar without a need for a device at all. Most Gen Z drivers are basically incapable of conceptualizing a map of an area in their head and completely dependent on a device to tell them where to go.

People can change in all kinds of ways.

My mum used to be just fine with reading maps, but one of the early symptoms of her Alzheimer’s (before any of us recognised it as such) was that maps stopped making any sense to her.

My dad wrote some kind of software for the Plessy (subsequently Marconi) military IFF transponder projects, but after retirement it literally took him years to realise that the Google search results had a scroll bar and it wasn’t just three results.

(Unrelated, but are we millennials really going to bemoan gen-Z the way people bemoaned us when we were their ages?)

"are we millennials really going to bemoan gen-Z the way people bemoaned us when we were their ages?"

Yes absolutely. It is the circle of life.

> You've obviously never driven with someone from an older generation.

Lol dude, your dad is not representative of an entire generation.

Man, I have some ancient folks in my family, verging on the 80s, and they are not technophobes. On the contrary, sometimes they annoy me with their over-trusting of google. My uncles trust google maps way more than they trust me.

My 90+ year old father-in-law still drives and does shortcuts in both urban and suburban environments that none of the maps programs have caught. None of his driving was remotely 'dangerous' either.

Not everyone ages at the same rate or in the same way. If only I could be that active at 90. First, have to make it to 90.

Aye. If I have to age naturally, I’d prefer to be like my grandmother than either of my parents. She made it to her mid 90s, an extra 15 years of good health in both body and mind and got to meet her great-granddaughter.

My father in law always turned on the navigation system, to then systematically disregard every direction given by the system, because he always knew a better way.

Usually took us forever to get to our destination…

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