02-24-09

Today is the day I had to leave my first customer's place and go to my second customer's place. They are in England. Things didn't go as well as I had hoped at the first customer's and I'm not satisfied. We're going to be going back there later to do some more work.

I showed my Tom Tom to the locals in Wales and told them how I was going to travel to Peterborough. They explained to me that I shouldn't trust that thing because it was taking me on a very heavily travelled stretch of highways. They were very nice and programmed another route in for me which would avoid all the heavy traffic.

What they didn't tell me was that I was going to hit an equal amount of traffic on THEIR route. What's more, when the traffic subsided, I was only going to be going about 30 mph. To make matters worse, there were more traffic circles than on the normal highway. It is easy to take the wrong exit on a traffic circle. It doesn't take much effort. Then, you have to wait until the next traffic circle to turn around and get back on track. All of this wastes time.

My three hour drive turned into 6 hours. *sigh* I do the best I can.

I got to the customer's late, but at least I had a chance to get some productive stuff accomplished. I booked a hotel that was suppossed to be about 4 miles away from the factory and I got their lattitude and longitude from their website. This is useful in the UK because many buildings don't have proper street numbers which makes them hard to find. You can plug the coordinates directly into the Tom Tom and it should lead you directly to the door.

The only problem is that I plugged the coordinates in while sitting in the customer's parking lot and it told me that hotel was 35 miles away! Man, was I ticked... I started driving when I suddenly realized what I did wrong. England is the location of the prime meridian. It goes right through Greenwich in London. This is why we use Greenwich Mean Time as our standard. In the states, all coordinates start with 'W' because we are always West of the Prime Meridian. Well, all it takes is a simple change in longitude from E 0.0191726 to W 0.0191726 to throw you off by several miles! When I changed the coordinate from west to east, it led me to my hotel. Where else in the world could you have this problem??!!!