Home is where my Prius is

Here is a little anecdote about our experience a few days ago when taking delivery of our Prius at the dealership.

After our salesperson was done with the paperwork and he gave us the keys, the next thing he did was to hand us off to an extremely friendly and genuinely sincere young man whose job it was to orient us with the features of the car. This guy could not have been more intent on being helpful, and answering any questions we had. I, on the other hand, wanted him out of our new computer so I could boot it up and start playing with the I/O system ("gas" pedal, "brake" pedal, electronic steering, etc.). I had downloaded PDFs of the manuals, read them cover to cover, and spent hours perusing this very informative website.

But this gentleman felt it was his sworn duty to teach us everything, so he persisted. I did not want to be rude, or seem ungrateful, so I and my DP both listened as he showed us the systems in the car (computer).

He wanted to demonstrate the navigation system, so he asked me to input our home address so that he could set it as our 'home' in the navigation system.

The poor guy could not remember how to do it, and I must say, as a person who designs documentation systems, that the user interface of this navigation system is not exactly perfect. The poor frustrated guy kept trying to do the same steps over and over, always getting the same error messages at the end. I was reminded of Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity.

Finally I insisted that we could read the manual, and we'd be able to figure it out, because between the two of us we have over 40 years experience in the computer industry. We managed to get him out of the car so we could play with our new toy.

Today I decided to explore the issue, and after five minutes of ferkling about I finally did set our home address as the location labelled Home with the assigned name Home. I would not say it was trivial, and, shame on me as a tech writer, I was not using the manual either.

I just got into the car (a computer, really), booted it into safe mode by pressing power without touching the brake pedal (I've declared that this is 'safe mode' because you can not accidentally run over anybody this way), and started pressing buttons.

I like the fact that this is the first computer that I have ever owned which I can comfortably sit inside, plus it is extremely portable. You might say that it is the opposite of a laptop computer.

All of my other computers (we have perhaps 25 computers in our home) have these nasty sharp edges and they are much too small to sit in.

So far, after 3 days of ownership, we still have less than 50 miles on this computer. My DP and I both work from home at least 5 days a week, so our typical commute mileage is about zero miles per month. We'll have to get busy here pretty soon and get some miles on this device.

GreenSteve

 

10132003 is correct, DP means Domestic Partner. My DP and I each have one.