As a rule, I like software. Installing a new program – or even reinstalling old programs – has always been sort of a Christmas morning thing for me. Building out a new computer and then deciding what software to install just gets me pumped up. Outside of playing my horn, there’s not much I’d rather do than install (and then play with) software.
That being said, I rarely like a program so much that I’m willing to give it unsolicited props. It’s not often that a computer program, much less an app on a phone, literally changes my life. Microsoft Access did in the early 90s. It provided a combination solution for my love of databases and my desire to write code and launched me on a career that, to some extent, continues to this day. Kindle (or, more generally, any book-reading application) changed the way that I read books. Sure, I generally have one or two paperbacks in the bathroom, but I’ve been carrying libraries on my PDA/phones since the late 90s, and whenever I have 5 or 10 minutes of down time, I open a book and read a few pages. Never really did that before eBooks hit the scene.
And now there’s Waze, an app that I installed on my phone just over a week ago, after my commutes to and from work had begun to convince me – seriously – that I would have to quit my job before I had a stroke (or just a nervous breakdown). I was complaining about my drive to one of the guys who was hired on the same day as I was, and he casually tossed out, “Just get Waze.”
I had to google the thing. Thought it was spelled “Ways,” which would make sense for a mapping application. Then I found it. Read about it. Installed it on my Windows phone. And couldn’t get past the initial agreement screen because it was so poorly written.
Turns out the Google had purchased Waze a few years ago and had stopped supporting Windows phone. But I was so intrigued by the idea of a crowd-sharing mapping program that I took my Android phone, which I had had fixed after it broke last year, but had never put back into service, up to the AT&T store and told them to make it a real phone again.
That’s right. I abandoned Windows phone just so I could try this app. And I made the right choice.
The first day that I used Waze to drive to work, it started me out in the “wrong” direction. Literally had me turning left at the end of my road, away from work, instead of right. But I thought to myself, “What the hell. It’s going to take me an hour anyway. I might as well see something new.”
Would you believe that I got to work in under 30 minutes? Or that, except for the last 1/2 mile – which is always going to be gridlocked – I wasn’t stuck in traffic at all? Or that I was regularly exceeding the speed limit, driving on little back roads that I didn’t even know existed?
I thought it was a fluke. “Wonder what it’ll do to get me home,” I thought. At 6:00 in the evening, after all, there’s NO WAY to get from Alpharetta to Duluth in under 75 minutes.
Waze got me home in under 40. I was blown away. I actually walked through the door of my house with a smile on my face.
So I used Waze for a few days going back and forth to work, and then decided to try it out on last weekend’s GBB tour through Alabama and Tennessee. It worked okay. Pretty much gave me the same directions as my Garmin, which is the go-to GPS for my long trips.
That is, it gave me the same directions until my trip home from Chattanooga last Sunday afternoon. I’m cruising down 75 and Waze suddenly chirps at me “Standstill ahead. Take exit blah blah and go WAAAAAY the hell out of your way.”
I paraphrase.
Since I didn’t have to be anywhere until Monday morning, I gave Waze the benefit of the doubt, and I took exit blah blah – which is the exit that I used to take when going camping in the middle of nowhere – and let it lead me home. Which it did, again finding little roads that I never knew about. I got home at about the time I’d expected to.
As it turned out, there was a major pile-up on 75, about 5 miles south of where I exited. Had I continued to follow my Garmin, I would’ve been stuck in traffic for about two additional hours. This little FREE app not only determined that my traffic was about to suck, but also figured out a way around it on the fly. My Garmin would’ve eventually told me that traffic sucked (probably when it was too late to change course), and then would have waited for me to tell it to find a new route.
Waze also sends me updates about things on the route. It will tell me, for example, “There’s heavy traffic 9 miles away on Kimball Bridge Road” when I leave my house. This is a given. There’s always heavy traffic on KBR. But it will also tell me, “Be careful. There’s road kill in your way in a mile.” Or “Police radar in two miles.” And it’ll put a little icon on my map telling me where the dead dog or the cop is. It warns of cars parked on the shoulder, water in the road, school busses stopping…anything that a normal person would notice – because it’s normal people updating the thing.
And so I sincerely offer this blog post in praise of Waze. It has definitely changed my drive, made me a happier person, and – possibly – lengthened my life.
Thank you, whoever invented this wonderful program.