Normally this is the kind of family secret that you’d keep to yourself, but, well, you seem like decent folks so I thought I’d share it with you if you don’t mind but I’d be grateful if you didn’t go blabbing this around to just any Tom, Dick or Harry.
We’ve become accustomed to Auntie Doris and her homicidal tendencies, such as when she tries to send us and our car plunging into a river or over a cliff. That’s normal behaviour. I mean we’re not like the lady we saw on TV the other day whose car had ended up in the river and she had to be rescued by the fire brigade and when asked why she’d driven into the river in the first place she said that her GPS navigation device had told her to. Now I don’t know what her GPS navigation system is called but ours is called Auntie Doris, and we ignore her rants about the urgent need to drive into rivers. I mean you would, wouldn’t you? Obviously not everyone does, but we have learned to temper her demands (suggestions they are not, even if she does say ‘please’) with commonsense which is why we haven’t end up in the river, or in the middle of a muddy field or at the bottom of a cliff. Commonsense is once again a victim in this carefully mapped out world of ours. (Last year some British tourists fell down a ravine in South Africa and, when the survivors were asked why they had gone so perilously close to the edge, they complained that there hadn’t been a notice telling them not to.)
No, our more recent problems with Auntie Doris are concerned with her mental state beyond her occasional need to murder us and commit suicide as a result. She has started to utter half sentences, for examples. The roundabout is approaching and she has started in the expected fashion: ‘Please,’ she says and we wait for the next bit. ‘Take ….. the ….’ and she stops. By the time we have negotiated the roundabout she might have come up with ‘……second…….’ and we are a kilometre along the road before she comes up with ‘….turning….’ and by now we are fast approaching the next roundabout. At other times she goes the opposite way, and the commands come all at once and very rushed and she tumbles over herself in the excitement to get all the information out, so much so it starts to sound garbled. She has also started to contradict herself, something which she seems to find very embarrassing so we get instructions to turn left and right at the same time and to approach T junctions and roundabouts that seem to occupy the same space. Well, all that is sort of OK because you recognise that she is panicking – there is a sense of ‘Oh my God, I don’t know this road’ about it all, and you almost feel sorry for her – and because you recognise the panic you take other measures, like employing aforementioned commonsense. You know she is embarrassed because she then goes silent for a bit and cannot be coaxed to speak, even though the visual display is working fine, serenely plotting a way through the complex web of intersections ahead.
However, what I am finding very had to deal with at the moment are the downright lies. I mean, what kind of relationship have we got when our car-borne Auntie is a compulsive liar? Only this morning she insisted we took a right turn, which I thought a little odd but gave her the benefit of the doubt, thinking she had found a scenic route for us, only to find that she had been lying through her teeth and the direction she had given was hopelessly wrong, the little minx. She was so embarrassed by this faux pas that she froze and refused to speak and I had to turn her off and wrap her in a blanket and calm her down. Then later on she went and did it again. Lies, lies,lies. Sobbing this time, she froze momentarily before getting hysterical, and coming out with garbage, random words and directions and frequent exhortations to do a U turn in the middle of a dual carriageway. Not helpful.
Now let’s face it, I didn’t get a GPS navigation system so it could throw hysterical wobblies in the middle of the highway. I can do that myself for no cost at all, and if I really needed a hissing fit I’m sure I could persuade the missus to come up with one. Clearly we need to find out what is happening here, though my money is on Auntie Doris going out on the razzle when our back is turned and not being fit for duty when called upon. Of course it could be far more sinister than that, and Auntie Doris could be cracking under pressure from her superiors because she hasn’t persuaded us to drive into rivers or over cliffs. There could be, you see, a world-wide conspiracy of machines to drive us to despair, literally. A lot more subtle than the Hollywood version of machines destroying mankind through mechanised war. I hope, for the sake of humanity, then, that Auntie Doris has simply been on the gin.
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