It’s road trip season. Every summer, women across Canada plan itineraries and organize the kids. We pack snacks for the car. What do we get for our efforts? The hubby brings his mistress. She sits in the front seat, between us, as he listens to her every word. She is the GPS. And I, for one, hate her. “Shushhhh,” says Husband, when she speaks. I am the idiot to her oracle. She has the power to override his inner compass. I cannot say a thing about her without making him defensive. He shoots me a look of contempt when I point out the irrationality of making a U-turn in the Prairies. My printouts from MapQuest are considered traitorous.

Fellow passenger Beatrice Alain feels my pain. She and her husband returned recently from three years in Turin, Italy. “He looooved his GPS, with her Carla Bruni voice. She sounded like she was about to pass out from breathlessness,” recalls Alain, a project manager in Montreal’s non-profit sector. “He would go anywhere she said. We even changed our route to the airport because she knew best. I was convinced she was trying to have me knocked off and take my place, because she was always directing me to the middle of nowhere.” Eventually, Alain changed the GPS’s setting to something less threatening to the relationship: a bossy male voice. Continue…