GPS: Globally Positioned Somewhere ... but where?

I have the dumbest GPS in the world.
The Trophy Wife laughs when I say that. She loves to remind me that the GPS is not a thinking, feeling being, but a machine that is only as good as the information programmed into it.
But I come from a long line of Southern-folk who know everything has a personality. My grandmother, Lassie Wheeler Smith, knew the gender of every object in her house and its emotional state at any given moment in time. After getting a poorly cooked piece of toast, she might say, "Ah, poor toaster; he's just tired right now." Or as she sat in her old chair on the back porch she might pat it lovingly and say, "She's been a good friend all these years and never asked for anything."
I admit to being afflicted with assigning personality to inanimate objects myself.
But anyway, I do have the dumbest GPS system in the world.
For example, the other night I was driving back to Birmingham, heading up I-65, and the interstate was closed. I pressed the "detour'' button, and was given an alternate route. The first option had me take a right turn here to be followed by an immediate  left, only the 'right' was a dead end and there was no left turn to take.
So I hit 'detour' again, and the GPS took me further down the road, a couple turns, and eventually brought me back to I-65 a few miles behind where I'd been forced to exit about a half-hour before!
Another time, I needed an auto parts store. The GPS has a system where you can type in the kind of place you're looking for and it gives you options, from the closest to the furthest away. In this case, it gave me an auto parts store less than a mile away, and I followed the directions perfectly - to a vacant lot. And the despite the GPS saying over and over, "you've arrived at your destination,'' there was nothing there.
It occurs to me there is a greater lesson here.
You can know where you want to go, and you can get directions on how to get there and follow them, step by step, turn by turn, as fervently and faithfully and devoutly as humanly possible, with no error or deviation.
But in the end, you're only as good as your guide.
If it's a GPS, it is annoying, but no big deal. In the case of going to Birmingham, I simply relied on what I'd learned over the years and found to be true: that Birmingham was north of where I was, that highway 31 should run parallel to the interstate, just a few miles to the west of where I was, and if I found highway 31 I could get to Birmingham.
And it worked, despite my GPS continually saying, "Turn right ... turn around .... turn left .... recalculating," I ignored it and went on with what I knew, based on past experience, to be right.
This is true on a lot of levels. And reminds us that it's not how committed you are to a path, how faithfully you follow the directions, how fervently you believe, in the end, if it's not the truth, you wind up standing in front of an empty lot in Gulfport, Mississippi, listening to an automated voice saying, "you've arrived at your destination,'' asking yourself, "What do I do now?''