It is a morning ritual. The routine scan of a traffic congestion map a few seconds before stepping out the door and into your car in the morning. You must check the current status of bottlenecks, accidents, queues, etc. along the usual routes connecting your home to your place of work.
You take a few seconds to evaluate your options and quickly decide on a plan of action. But the information is imperfect: the quality of the congestion data is questionable, a fact borne out by days and months and years of trying to game the traffic nightmare. Even if it were reliable, it only describes what is going on right now. By the time you hit the freeway, the ground reality has shifted from under your feet.
What's to be done in such cases?
MS DOS to the rescue! After all these years, it appears that the now-nostalgic (but then-frustrating) monochrome message captures today's driver routing decision process very well:
Indeed. When you hit unexpected congestion, you have three options:
(1) Abort the route, ignore the GPS device, and try to find a better way based on your own skills,
(2) Retry after hitting the GPS device and/or re-starting it to see if it somehow finds a better route, or,
(3) Fail in your attempt to get to work, execute a U-turn, and head back home.
How prescient that the retro DOS message even included the word "drive"?!
Today was an Abort for me. As is usually the case.
