The Genie in My Pocket

“Dammit!”

I knew I should have pulled off sooner.

According to my directions I’m still a few miles shy of the Kodak Theater. I’m late for the conference, lost, and the emergency light on my fuel gauge has been lit for ten minutes.

I look left, then straight ahead, both directions showing nothing but a sea of stalled metal and red lights. I sigh, flick my blinker, then turn the steering wheel of the old Sienna right, cursing myself in every word I know in my native tongue, plus a few I know in others.

I shouldn’t have left Long Beach without gassing up.

I thought I could make it, left home with more than a quarter tank and only 30 miles to go. It was early, but LA traffic can be murder and I wanted to get into the heart of the city before the arteries clogged. The last 90 minutes spent at near standstill had reduced the tank to fumes. Now I was winding my way through the canyons of Mulholland Drive without direction in the vain hope I’d stumble upon a gas station before the Sienna started to sputter.

I suddenly smiled.

I remembered my miracle phone came complete with GPS. I pulled to the side of the road, which apparently angered the man in the black Escalade who gunned his engine and sat on his horn as he passed me.

I picked up the phone and hit the MAPS app, typing the word gas into the search field. A small map of the city appeared with one pin for me along with several other pins for gas stations dotted around my proximity, the closest of which was 0.4 miles away.

0.4 miles away!

It was almost spitting distance, but also in a place I never would have looked. Five minutes later and I was topping my tank and typing “Kodak Theater” into the Map. A neat blue line showed me exactly how to get from my A to B.

At lunch, I decided to get out of the theater and off for a walk. The streets of Hollywood are amusing after all. The Kodak is where the Academy Awards are held and sits directly next to the Mann’s Chinese Theater, where a riot of costumed panhandlers gather for passing attention. That day I saw Batman, Captain America, Shrek, Darth Vadar and Jack Sparrow, and that was just while I was descending the stairs. I stood on the corner and took out my phone. I knew where I wanted to go, just not how to get there. After listening to countless people over the previous two weeks telling me I needed to read Gary Vaynerchuck’s Crush It, I’d  finally decided to go to the book store and buy it.

I typed “Borders” into the map and it blinked back with a route, a half mile away.

Of all the things I expected to love about the iPhone, the Map feature wasn’t even on my radar. Perhaps it’s because my first several years behind the wheel were spent doing deliveries and as a result I’ve driven tens of thousands of miles while having to navigate my next move on the fly, or maybe it’s that I’ve lived in the same area my entire life. Could be I’m a dude and therefore allergic to asking for directions. For whatever reason, I love that now when I need directions, there’s a genie in my pocket that will help me and never tell anyone I needed to know.

Thanks for keeping my secret.

Writer Dad

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