by Doug DeMuro
So here’s the deal: the Waze app is a program you can use on your phone that lets you know if there are police on the road ahead, based on data reported by other road users. How it works is, you’re driving along on the highway, and you see a police officer with a radar gun on the side of the road. So you report it to your Waze app, and then other road users see it, and then they slow down. This is the last example of altruism we have in our society that isn’t tax-deductible.
Also, Mom, it’s Monday.
I first downloaded the Waze app when I discovered I would have to drive to New York City every few weeks for work. Actually, I should’ve downloaded it then. I didn’t really download it until a few days later, when I was physically on the New Jersey Turnpike, traveling eighty miles per hour, after passing someone who had been pulled over by the police. This is when I learned the drawbacks of the App Store requirement that your password must include lower case letters, and upper case letters, and numbers, and special characters.
So I downloaded the Waze app, and I began to use it right then, and that’s when I first discovered the flaws.
The biggest flaw is obvious the moment you fire it up: the Waze app doesn’t only show you where the police are.
Now, if you’ve never used the app before, you’re probably thinking: What else does it show you? Ambulances? Firefighters? Notary publics? And the answer is: No. None of that. It shows you other Waze users with little cartoonish badges next to their current position.
In other words, here’s how the typical interaction with Waze goes. You’re driving down the highway at something like fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit, and you want to know if there are any police officers on the road ahead. So you glance down at your trusty Waze app, which is designed to inform you of exactly this issue, and you see … a star. A king’s crown. A dinosaur. A smiley face. A dude who looks like Elvis carrying a sword.
According to Waze, the world is littered with bizarre cartoonish figures on virtually every single road. It’s like Disney World, except you’re in New Jersey.
So I smartened up. I read the Waze directions, and I messed with the settings, and I discovered I could turn off the other users from showing up on my screen. This is good news, but not as good as it would’ve been if the default setting were “Weird Cartoon Things: Off.” After all, how many Waze users fire up the app and say: Hmmm … no need to worry about the police, because I plan on going slowly today. But what I really want to know is if I’m sharing the road with any dinosaurs wearing a crown!
Unfortunately, turning off the other road users still doesn’t solve all the problems. I say this because I have now set my Waze set to notify me for “Alerts Only,” which means I’m getting the most dire, the most important, the most serious alerts, like police, and accidents, and severe traffic. And also …
Vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead.
Seriously: I get this every five minutes. Vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead. Vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead. Vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead. Waze considers this an “important alert.” I have no idea why. “Vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead” is not an alert. It’s normal human life, like walking, or jogging, or forgetting your phone charger in a hotel room. Waze informing me that there’s a vehicle stopped on the shoulder ahead is akin to my alarm clock beeping every forty-five minutes just to inform me that forty-five minutes have passed. While Waze is at it, it might as well tell me the location of the local trees and power lines, because that’s approximately as useful.
So a few weeks ago, I was explaining my concerns with Waze to my girlfriend just as we were coming back from Princeton, New Jersey, which is about forty minutes away from our house. In order to show her what I was talking about, I fired up the app, and right then it said: Caution! Animals in area.
“Animals in area?!” I started to complain. “That is the single dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life! Animals are MOBILE! If there was an animal here two minutes ago, it would already be gone! I can’t believe that Waze—”
And right then, a deer strolled out on to the road, far enough away that I was able to slow down in time to change lanes.
I haven’t complained since.
The Tire Blowout and the Rented Peugeot
I recently got back from a trip to Malta, which is this tiny little island in the Mediterranean that dozens of countries have been fighting over for thousands of years, despite the fact that it has no apparent benefit.
I mean this very sincerely. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed my time on Malta, and I had fun exploring Malta, and I will be sure that this page isn’t included in the Amazon book preview so I don’t lose sales to any of Malta’s forty-seven residents or its eighty-one stray cats. But the place is sort of a wasteland, in the sense that it primarily consists of crumbling buildings, no trees, and lots of wind and sand. Lots of wind and sand is a bad combination for a vacation destination, because it means you basically spend your entire trip wandering around wishing you had contact solution.
Now, I admit there are a few cool things in Malta, like for example that the president drives around in a late-1990s BMW 7 Series with a crown for a license plate. No numbers or letters; just a crown. This, to me, is one of the coolest job perks I could possibly imagine. Think about it: your meter is expired, and the meter maid walks by, and he starts to give you a ticket, and he gets to the part where it says “LICENSE PLATE,” and he glances at your license plate to write it down, and BOOM! Crown. What the hell does he do? Draw a picture of a crown? Hell no he doesn’t! He walks the hell away! You could stay in that spot for a month.
Another cool thing about Malta: there was a really exciting model car shop in the capital, Valetta. However, I suspect that it wasn’t there back when the Romans (or whoever) were fighting the Normans (or whoever) for control of the island back in 472 AD (or whatever). If it had been, the Romans (or whoever) never would’ve surrendered, because this place had everything, including a 1:43 scale Suzuki Sidekick.
One reason people fought over Malta, apparently, is that it has this excellent position right in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. But I’ve never really understood why this was an advantage thousands of years ago. In today’s world, sure: you’re in the middle of the Mediterranean, so you can lob missiles at every Tom, Dick, and immigrant raft that cruises by.
But back then, they didn’t have missiles. They had rocks, and sticks, and clothing that primarily consisted of robes. So if you didn’t want to get killed when you went through the Mediterranean, all you had to do was just avoid Malta. And nobody could really do anything about it except stand on the shore, pray that the wind carried the sand out your direction, and hope you’d forgotten your contact solution.
So anyway, now that I’ve told you everything there is to know about Malta, I think it’s time to explain exactly what happened on my vacation there. Namely, I destroyed a Peugeot convertible and I didn’t tell anyone about it.
I kind of figured something bad would happen when I rented the car at the Malta Airport and the cheerful Avis woman told me that my rental car insurance policy covered—this is a direct quote—“everything but the mirrors.” In other words: mirrors are getting smashed off rental cars so frequently in Malta that Avis’s insurance company has stopped covering them. I quickly surmised that this would be like moving to New Orleans and buying a flood insurance policy that covers everything but water damage.
So my girlfriend and I walked outside, and we got to the car, and we discovered they’d given us a Peugeot 308 CC, which is a hardtop convertible that’s sort of like a normal car, except it’s French, so it looks like a fancy tape dispenser.
Now, I was thrilled about the 308 CC because we had booked a convertible, and by God they had given us a convertible, and now we were going to cruise around this Mediterranean island for the next four days with the top down, and the sun on our faces, and the wind in our hair, and, presumably, the mirrors folded in.
The 308 CC seemed perfect until the m
oment we left the rental car area, at which point its major problem became incredibly obvious. Yes, the 308 CC is a nice little compact car. But the roads in Malta are nice little subcompact roads. What I mean by this is, on more than one occasion, Google Maps directed me to drive down a road that was actually a walking path. Driving the 308 CC here felt like playing beer pong with basketballs.
Even though we quickly realized this on the first day of our journey, we pressed on, undeterred. Thinking back on it today, I now see that we should’ve rejected the car like an Upper East Side co-op board with an applicant named Gutierrez. Unfortunately, we did not.
Oh, and here’s something else about Malta that I forgot to mention: they drive on the other side of the road. Now, I don’t want to get into any arguments about whether right-hand drive is better or whether left-hand drive is better, because those go on forever. So I’m just going to come out and tell you the facts: left-hand drive is better. You right-hand drive people are nuts, because most humans are right-handed, and driving a right-hand drive car means that the majority of the car—including shifting gears—is entrusted to your non-dominant side.
This is a very bad idea. When I was driving that car in Malta, I had never driven a right-hand drive car before, and I would guess that I was aware of maybe 30 percent of what was happening on the left side of my car. On the right side, yes: the road lines, the steering wheel, the speedometer—I had it all down. But I had never previously experienced a situation where I had an entire car to my left, including the gear lever, and the result was extremely disorienting. Over in the passenger seat, my girlfriend could’ve switched places with a shelving unit, and I wouldn’t have noticed until I asked her to look up better directions because Google was telling us to drive down a balance beam.
So driving in Malta was a bit of a challenge, and it was made even worse by the fact that the roads were absolutely awful. I’ve often heard bad things about Michigan roads, and I’ve always personally felt that New Orleans roads are the worst in America, but compared to Malta, those places feel like you’re driving a Zamboni after the first period. In Malta, they could put discarded office supplies down on the roads, and it would actually make the whole thing a little smoother. “Oh, they finally fixed that bump!” wives would say to their husbands as they cruised down a Maltese road. “Yes!” the husband would reply. “With an Epson!”
So we drove around for a couple days, and I almost got into a couple of serious accidents, including one where I nearly backed into three stories of scaffolding while parallel parking during a heavy rainstorm. This would’ve undoubtedly killed us, and destroyed the scaffolding, and ruined every other parked car in the vicinity, though I breathed a sigh of relief afterwards upon remembering that I would’ve been entirely insured in this accident unless the mirrors were damaged.
Anyway: on the last day of our trip, we decided to go to Gozo.
For those of you who aren’t up on your Maltese geography, allow me to explain where Gozo is, using highly technical terms so that you can clearly identify it on a map and excitedly follow along with this story: near Malta.
In fact, it’s this rural second island north of Malta that offers a lot of additional beauty, and more rolling hills, and extra coastline, and a wide array of wind-and-sand combinations ranging from “irritating your eyes” to “feels like a hedgehog is rubbing up against your cheeks.”
So we were driving around Gozo, seeing all the sights (“Look! Some sand being blown by the wind!”), when we reached a road that is truly unlike anything I’ve ever seen. This road made a moon crater look like a sand trap. Made the surface of Mars seem like a marble. Made the Grand Canyon seem like a DVD return slot. When you see a road like this, you start to hold road-paving crews in the same esteem you might hold a priest, or a firefighter, or a Navy SEAL. Naturally, I took it at full speed.
Now, I should say that wasn’t my intention. In fact, the second I saw how bad the road was, I immediately slammed on my brakes. But it was too late. There were bangs. There were bumps. There were booms. And before I even reached the next stop sign, my tire pressure light was on.
When I got out to survey the damage, I discovered that the front tire was flat, and the rear tire now featured a bulge so big that it seemed like I was keeping a 12-year-old child in there against his will, and he was trying to poke his way out.
So let me set the scene for you: We’re thousands of miles away from home. Thousands of miles from Triple-A. Driving a rental car. With a tire blowout. With nobody around. In the rural, northern, alternate island of a country where the insurance company won’t even cover the mirrors.
In my view, there was only one thing do: irrationally freak out.
So while my girlfriend patiently called the rental car company to ask for advice, I began cursing quite dramatically (“YOU F***ING PIECE OF S*** PEUGEOT WITH YOUR SMUG LITTLE MOTHERF***ING LION LOGO”), and then even more dramatically (“WHY THE F*** DO YOUR HEADLIGHTS LOOK LIKE YOU’RE GRINNING AT ME? WHAT THE F*** ARE YOU SO HAPPY ABOUT?”), and then even more dramatically (“ARE YOU HAPPY BECAUSE YOU WERE BUILT BY F***ING SOCIALISTS WHO WALKED OFF THE JOB UNTIL PEUGEOT INSTALLED MASSAGING TOILETS IN THE FACTORY BATHROOMS?”). Somehow, during this tirade, I also managed to retrieve the tire-changing kit from the trunk.
Now, it had been a while since I had changed a tire, and I think we’d all agree that these weren’t exactly optimal conditions: under pressure to catch the ferry back to Malta, with the sun going down, on a rural island, in a foreign country where Ħ is an actual letter of the alphabet.
There was also another concern: owing to excellent road work done by the Maltese Department of Transportation (motto: “Goats use it, so why can’t you? Ħ!!”), the entire underside of the car was caked in mud, so I had no idea where the jacking point was. And it’s at this moment I will admit, ladies and gentlemen, that my guess was very, very wrong.
Here’s what happened: I began by sticking the jack underneath the car and turning the bars, as you’re supposed to. And the car went up. So I kept turning, and the car kept going up. More turning, more up. More turning, more up. And then I started thinking: “This isn’t so bad!” And so I turned, and the car lifted, and I turned, and the car lifted, until the car … dropped.
Apparently, the jacking point I had chosen wasn’t my little Peugeot’s muddy frame. It was the Peugeot’s muddy bodywork. In other words: I had the entire weight of the car’s front right corner resting on a piece of French plastic manufactured by the lowest bidder. So the car collapsed on the jack, the jack compressed back to its natural state, and the rocker panel expanded out like an exercise ball with Shaq sitting on it.
It was at this moment that a roadside assistance guy showed up.
I’m not kidding. We’re in a tiny, sparsely populated country with cell phone coverage that does or doesn’t work depending on the exact sidewalk where you’re standing, on the especially isolated second island, which is an hour by ferry from the mainland, in a place where you’ll sometimes get in a traffic jam behind a guy who’s using an ATV to herd his goats—and a roadside assistance guy shows up nine minutes after my girlfriend calls the rental car company. By comparison, if you call Triple-A in America, they’ll show up between noon and Thanksgiving.
So basically I’m sitting there struggling with the jack, and the lug nuts, and the dirty tire, and the spare, and I’m trying to figure out where the hell the frame is, and I’m dealing with all the little French tire-changing materials packaged in this little French tire-changing kit, and I’ve just damaged the vehicle, and then this guy shows up.
And what does he do?
He walks up to the Peugeot with some compressed-air thing, he jacks it up in four seconds, he pulls off the old tire in eight seconds, he puts on the new one in six seconds, he tightens the lug nuts in eleven seconds, and the car is completely fixed in less than a minute. I’m not kidding. The whole thing was like a NASCAR pit stop, except that instead of a giant NASCAR team trailer, he was driving an
old Ford Transit that looked like he had purchased it used from a guy who delivered bathroom fixtures to active war zones.
Here’s the best part: when he finished changing the tire, he just drove off. He didn’t speak any English, and we didn’t speak any Maltese, so basically he arrived, he silently changed our tire, he silently got back into his van, and he silently drove off into the Maltese countryside. For all we know, maybe he wasn’t even associated with the rental car company. He may have been a rogue shadow warrior, a self-employed tourist rescuer who cruises around Gozo in a van stocked with tire changing equipment and contact solution.
Here’s how I thought this story would end: I pull in to the Avis car return place the next day, and the guy starts screaming in Maltese about how I destroyed the rocker panel, and the rear tire is growing a tumor, and the spare is flat, and basically he just yells “Ħ!!!!” “Ħ!!!!” over and over until I miss my flight.
Here’s how it actually ended: On the way back to the airport, I drove through every single dirty puddle in Malta in an attempt to cover up the damage. Then I returned the car, signed the papers, and ran into the terminal with approximately the same velocity as an Olympic bobsled. Oh, and I forgot to fill it with gas.