GPS

I am one of those individuals who does not own a smart phone. I am also one of those individuals who cannot read a map. Once I tried to read a map in 2008 and I was informed that it was upside down. That was the last time I bothered trying to read a map. Other times involving me trying to read a map generally ended in bad areas, unknown areas, or at least areas we were not at all trying to get to. I am somewhat convinced my sense of direction comes from my father, while my father would rather consider the possibility that I am in fact an alien rather than the possibility that this a shared trait.
In any case, I am the perfect candidate for a GPS, being unable to make use of a phone or a map or my limited brain power. I've managed to get by all right though, mostly due to the fact that I was mostly driving around Pittsburgh, where I'd lived for ten years. Rachael will be the first to tell you that despite my ten years of experience, I had a few misadventures, but for the most part I felt pretty confident.
Now, however, I am in the D.C. area, which includes the city, Maryland, and Virginia which include treacherous paths like the Beltway and lots of roads with numbers like 355 and 187 and 185 and 495 and I am beginning to lose track of what goes where. Those are just the big ones. In my neighborhood alone we have at least a million one-way streets, and four million streets that have signs that say things like, "DO NOT ENTER! but only on Mondays and Wednesdays from 7-9 in the morning and 4-6 in the evening and sometimes on Saturdays when it's raining but only when you can see the moon in the sky during the day and the neighbor is playing the accordion on the porch with his dog."
And if that's not enough to drive a person insane, half the streets are shut down for construction, so even though I finally managed to pick out a few safe routes they've all been shut down by large machines and men and sometimes it takes me an hour to get down the street.
I spend half of my time driving backwards and forwards and making possibly illegal u-turns, some of which have been near-misses that almost resulted in accidents that would have made the evening news.

I think it may be time to join the ranks of functioning driving Americans and buy a damn gadget, before one of my poor driving decisions ends in total destruction.