My husband will be the first to tell you that his century of preference is the 19^th one—except for air conditioning, indoor plumbing, satellite and high-def TV, and a slew of other things.

One tech advancement that he deeply disdains, however, is any map app on any smartphone.

The routes are not how he’d go. The detours are nonsensical. The directions are hard to follow; you can’t tell which lane the phone wants you in until it’s too late and you’ve chosen the wrong one. He sometimes misses the topmost instruction and fusses about “it never told me to get off the interstate but it’s telling me to turn left on First Street.”

(It does not help that sometimes he expects me to be helping and I’m busy staring out the window reading names of stores and staring at pedestrians—you know, because I assume the phone has navigation handled.)

I have some sympathy for him, but my relation with the phone is less fraught. First of all, I am more bovine in nature. Live by the phone, die by the phone. If it tells me to take a 40-mile detour, I don’t mind. If it sends me from Illinois to Florida via New York, I’ll cock my head, but then figure a drive through New York might be fun and leave earlier. If I miss a turn, I’m quite content to circle back a mile later—or farther, if traffic is bad and I can’t do it sooner.

I am not sure how much of this difference between us is driven by personality vs. experience. The hubs absolutely adores maps. He will sit and study the road atlas in front of the fireplace for fun. He gets nervous driving on dirt roads and never takes them if he can avoid it, but he’ll follow them for miles on paper. He likes “knowing where things are.”

I am much less fixed in space. I have a general idea that things are … you know, over that way somewhere … maybe half an hour or so? We live in a tiny town (seriously, it is tiny; if I leave my seat belt off, I am literally halfway through town before the alarm stops dinging) and after nearly three years, I still haven’t memorized all the street names. I am one of those folks who gets Americans mocked by other nations. I have no idea where Montenegro is (over there by Italy somewhere?) and I have no idea what the capital is. So what do I do? I look it up. On my phone. Turns out it is over there by Italy somewhere and the capital is Podgorica. The phone not only told me all that, it also would have told me how to pronounce it if I’d had the volume up. (I did not, so my husband got to correct me after I sounded it out to him.)

I think part of the reason I’m partial to the phone directing me is because in my younger days, I lived in Los Angeles and spent a lot of time getting lost. Anyone who has a pre-phone history with that place will remember the joy of the Thomas Guide. (I guess there were Thomas Guides for other places—Seattle, DC … but NOT New York, oddly enough.) Driving in LA was fraught enough—everyone is impatient, nobody will let you merge—and dealing with the Thomas Guide on top of that was like trying to read a Choose Your Own Adventure book (You are on Cahuenga. Turn to page E-42…) while trailing other cars, avoiding pedestrians, minding traffic signals, and getting out of the way of a random ambulance or police chase. On top of all that, I lived under constant fear that my car would just die in the middle of the road and I’d have no idea what to do about it. The Thomas Guide would not call AAA for me or help me get to a garage. And then, once I’d actually found my destination, the Thomas Guide was absolutely zero help in locating parking in a 40-mile radius. My phone will map me to a parking structure and tell me how long a walk I have to look forward to. (I mean, usually. It does have problems in metro areas, and will occasionally spin in circles for a few minutes trying to get its bearings. I find this amusing, but the hubs will huff and sigh and just strike out in whatever direction he thinks is right—and he’s usually correct, but I’m not sure that gratification makes up for his high blood pressure.)

It drives my husband nuts that the kid never looks at maps. “What are you going to do when the internet goes out and you don’t know where to turn?” The kid shrugs. “Miss the turn. Hope I don’t run out of gas.”

Clearly, the kid takes after me. Not sure if that’s a good thing, though.  At least we know he’ll probably never be without a calculator?