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skyringMonday night was awful. Really bad. For a start, I've got a temporary day driver, so I had to drive all the way over to Belconnen, where the car is living. I had to start at 1630, one and a half hours into the busy time, because, as the driver breathlessly and apologetically explained, the car had been in the workshop.
Main thing they did was to install a new display screen unit. This one has a GPS navigation system installed and a few little extra wrinkles. I hate it. The old GPS system didn't calculate routes for the driver like this one did, but it kept track of the car's location on a scrolling map that was actually just the street directory maps joined up and scanned in. Every street named, and you could scroll in and out, pan it around instantly.
The beauty of this was that when the passenger mumbled a street name at you, you could scroll to the suburb, zoom in, and search for the street, and in the process work out the best way of getting there. While driving.
This one, the map is computer-generated on the fly, and for all but the greatest level of zoom, the street names aren't shown. Well, they are for the major roads, and the main streets in a suburb, but I already know those ones. It's the little streets that I don't know, and if I want to find out where Bloggs Street is, I've got to zoom right in and pan around. Trouble with that is that each click of the pan button only moves the display a fraction, and it takes several seconds. So this pretty much rules out searching for a street while I drive to it.
What makes it worse is that some of the streets aren't named at all, nor are they shown fully. I checked out the map for Kaleen, and along the main loop street of Maribyrnong Crescent, several small streets are shown as un-named stubs, when in reality they are loop streets in their own right.
"Campaspe Circuit, Kaleen," the passenger might say, and I could look all day on the map display and never find it.
I do have the option of entering the street name and letting the GPS guide me in, but I've long criticised GPS-guided drivers as being unprofessional, and my initial experiments indicate that the GPS route isn't necessarily the most efficient. In one case it was not only nearly twice as long as the best route, but it wanted me to drive along a street that didn't exist at all.
I'd also have to know the spelling of the street name to enter it in, and often my intoxicated passengers only have the foggiest idea of spelling. Usually I get around this by searching the suburb for names that sound similiar to what has been mumbled to me, and confirming plausible candidates with the passenger. But I can't do this any more, as the only street names displayed at a searchable level are ones I already know.
All in all, it sucks. I'm going to have to go back to pulling out the street directory and looking it up.
But that wasn't the worst bit of the shift. No way. I signed on and accepted a job. Silver Service, city to the airport, fairly standard stuff for that time of day. Picked up my passenger, turned the meter on, drove to the airport, dropped him off and then turned to the computer screen to find another job.
Odd. It showed me as "Booked", meaning I had a job that I hadn't picked up yet. I checked the list of jobs, and there was only the one, so I hadn't been given a fresh one by the system. In fact, I realised, the system thought that I hadn't picked up my first passenger at all.
Usually, when I turn the meter on, the system changes from "Booked" to "Pick Up" and when I turn it off, the system shows the job as completed and automatically logs me into whatever area I happen to be in.
But in this case, the computer didn't recognise the meter as being connected at all. I could turn it on and off and nothing happened on the display. I was still booked for radio jobs, and if I picked up from a rank, it showed me as vacant. For the rest of the shift, I had to contact base each time I finished a job to get them to reset my status.
The system was too loud and it took me a while to find out how to fix that, and the display was too bright, and the cable kept popping out and turning the screen a lovely bright blue, just great for driving along in the dark with a blue searchlight shining in your eyes.
I also checked my alarm button, and it didn't work. I depend on this for security, and while I've only had to use it once in two years, when I need it, I need it instantly. This was almost enough for me to give up entirely on the night, but Monday nights are usually pretty safe. If it had been a Thursday or a Friday, I would have cut the shift short.
All in all, I was a grumpy night driver. I found a spot to have a snooze around eleven, and zonked out for a good half hour, and that helped sweeten me up a bit, but by the time my shift ended at three in the morning, I hadn't made my target. I wrote out a note for the day driver, setting out the shortcomings of the system, then drove home, a most unhappy cabbie.
Main thing they did was to install a new display screen unit. This one has a GPS navigation system installed and a few little extra wrinkles. I hate it. The old GPS system didn't calculate routes for the driver like this one did, but it kept track of the car's location on a scrolling map that was actually just the street directory maps joined up and scanned in. Every street named, and you could scroll in and out, pan it around instantly.
The beauty of this was that when the passenger mumbled a street name at you, you could scroll to the suburb, zoom in, and search for the street, and in the process work out the best way of getting there. While driving.
This one, the map is computer-generated on the fly, and for all but the greatest level of zoom, the street names aren't shown. Well, they are for the major roads, and the main streets in a suburb, but I already know those ones. It's the little streets that I don't know, and if I want to find out where Bloggs Street is, I've got to zoom right in and pan around. Trouble with that is that each click of the pan button only moves the display a fraction, and it takes several seconds. So this pretty much rules out searching for a street while I drive to it.
What makes it worse is that some of the streets aren't named at all, nor are they shown fully. I checked out the map for Kaleen, and along the main loop street of Maribyrnong Crescent, several small streets are shown as un-named stubs, when in reality they are loop streets in their own right.
"Campaspe Circuit, Kaleen," the passenger might say, and I could look all day on the map display and never find it.
I do have the option of entering the street name and letting the GPS guide me in, but I've long criticised GPS-guided drivers as being unprofessional, and my initial experiments indicate that the GPS route isn't necessarily the most efficient. In one case it was not only nearly twice as long as the best route, but it wanted me to drive along a street that didn't exist at all.
I'd also have to know the spelling of the street name to enter it in, and often my intoxicated passengers only have the foggiest idea of spelling. Usually I get around this by searching the suburb for names that sound similiar to what has been mumbled to me, and confirming plausible candidates with the passenger. But I can't do this any more, as the only street names displayed at a searchable level are ones I already know.
All in all, it sucks. I'm going to have to go back to pulling out the street directory and looking it up.
But that wasn't the worst bit of the shift. No way. I signed on and accepted a job. Silver Service, city to the airport, fairly standard stuff for that time of day. Picked up my passenger, turned the meter on, drove to the airport, dropped him off and then turned to the computer screen to find another job.
Odd. It showed me as "Booked", meaning I had a job that I hadn't picked up yet. I checked the list of jobs, and there was only the one, so I hadn't been given a fresh one by the system. In fact, I realised, the system thought that I hadn't picked up my first passenger at all.
Usually, when I turn the meter on, the system changes from "Booked" to "Pick Up" and when I turn it off, the system shows the job as completed and automatically logs me into whatever area I happen to be in.
But in this case, the computer didn't recognise the meter as being connected at all. I could turn it on and off and nothing happened on the display. I was still booked for radio jobs, and if I picked up from a rank, it showed me as vacant. For the rest of the shift, I had to contact base each time I finished a job to get them to reset my status.
The system was too loud and it took me a while to find out how to fix that, and the display was too bright, and the cable kept popping out and turning the screen a lovely bright blue, just great for driving along in the dark with a blue searchlight shining in your eyes.
I also checked my alarm button, and it didn't work. I depend on this for security, and while I've only had to use it once in two years, when I need it, I need it instantly. This was almost enough for me to give up entirely on the night, but Monday nights are usually pretty safe. If it had been a Thursday or a Friday, I would have cut the shift short.
All in all, I was a grumpy night driver. I found a spot to have a snooze around eleven, and zonked out for a good half hour, and that helped sweeten me up a bit, but by the time my shift ended at three in the morning, I hadn't made my target. I wrote out a note for the day driver, setting out the shortcomings of the system, then drove home, a most unhappy cabbie.
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Date: 2008-11-26 06:56 pm (UTC)Hope all is better tonight.