It knows where we live

"Where's South from here?"

So I'm sitting with mom and dad, going over how to delete e-mails (again) and feeling quietly joyful about how engaged dad seems to be with his new digital toy. He shows me how to play a game that I couldn't figure out, and at one point reminds my mom (again) to "tap it, don't press it!"

Cool.

Then it occurs to me he's always been a gadget guy so I shouldn't be surprised that he's taken to this new one. I tell him about one of my bosses – a guy in his 60s, who got a tech to come in consolidate all his remote controls so now he has this giant mega remote that controls every electronic device in his house – and how that sounds like something dad would do. We laugh.

I tease him about how, in the past, he had bought all these GPS devices and then never learned how to use them, and how ridiculous it was for someone like my dad to even own a GPS. Because, I said, "you could be dropped from a helicopter, blindfolded, in the middle of the Amazon jungle with a handful of salt and piece of string and still find your way out. What the fuck do you need a GPS for?"

We laugh. Hard. Now, it occurs to me we've been laughing more lately.

I tell him the iPad is actually a GPS device too – he had noticed how the mapping App had marked their address. "Hey, it knows where we live," he tells my mom. She thinks that's kind of creepy.

Unfortunately, I did not inherit dad's highly tuned sense of direction, and mom has none at all. Then dad asks mom, "where's south from here?" She thinks and points at a wall. "I don't think so" he says. As they are discussing it, I think, surely there's a Compass App... within seconds I'd downloaded it and handed it to dad.

"what do you know, she was right." he says quietly.

This thing is going to be the ultimate argument solver.