I haven’t been traveling all that much for business recently (it’s the economy, you know), but I did have a recent 90-minute drive to the Milwaukee area to attend a press function presented by Milwaukee Tool, which is be featured in the July 6 issue of The NEWS.

The trip did give me a chance to really test the Global Positioning System (GPS) I got for Christmas and haven’t had much use for since then. Where we live, the roads are pretty flat and straight and having been on them repeatedly for several years now, the car seems to know where to go.

Fact of the matter is I sometimes know routes that make more sense than the way the GPS wants me to go. In fact, have the volume turned on, and veer away from the GPS route and a very polite, but very firm female voice will announced, “Perform a U-turn when possible.” It is kind of fun to really mess with “her” mind and make “her” make that announcement as often as possible — kind of a variation on the old “Hello Bob” college drinking game based on a catch phrase from one of the old Bob Newhart TV shows.

The GPS did indeed find Milwaukee Tool easily enough which definitely shows that the company is an established presence in its neighborhood. By contract, the street in the newer subdivision where my wife and I live it apparently isn’t GPS’d yet, since it never seems to be able to find our home.