Close Enough for Government Work- NOT!

I work near a major international airport. This means that it is easier to get on an airplane and travel cross country than it is to fight traffic and travel to a different part of my metropolitan area.

So I'm not in Kansas, although I've been there. They don't have the kind of traffic in Kansas that we have here closer to a salty ocean. I've even used various Garmin GPS products while visiting Kansas City (or while getting lost there). Avis will rent you one! But they lock it so that you can't play with it while driving. Even if you happen to be sitting in the passenger seat.

I've lost track of the GPS and mapping products I now own. My addiction to mapping dates back to March 9, 1500. Eight years earlier someone else went West and thought he'd reached India. But back then an ancestor of mine left a coastal city on the south-westernmost region of Europe, and while he didn't actually get lost, on April 22, he kind of bumped into a continent. Lucklily he didn't claim that it was India. His mentor had proven that to get to the real India, you go south, then turn left. Seems my ancester had headed west to avoid light air, after leaving the Cape Verde Islands, saw a mountain on the horizon, and the following day landed on the coast to check it out. Eventually my family got a little embarrassed by this and other oddities and changed the family name. But that's another story.

So when DeLorme introduced the TOPO USA product I quickly snatched it up. Pushing my paper charts aside, I loaded it onto my laptop and went exploring. I bought every new version of it. I worked down the street from Trimble Navigation for a while and positively drooled over the prospect of someone like me owning a GPS unit.

Another of my brothers (he changed his name to Bill) worked in a super secret military installation not too far from Trimble and became a GPS Satellite Repairman. Working underground in something called an 'Earth Station', he made a big deal out of being a cold warrior. I thought the whole thing kind of stupid, and he refused to talk about his classified work.

I mean, come on, what kind of idiot repairs orbiting satellites from underground in an EARTH STATION? You don't 'hide' an earth station underground and put it directly under a one block square blue cube then set up huge satellite dishes and claim it's a secret. I mean, the Russians weren't THAT stupid!

When the government came to talk to the rest of us about his background check for his security clearance we made jokes about our ancestor and the irony that 'Bill' would now be doing 'government work' on anything related to navigation.

'Close enough for government work' was a popular saying at the time.

That was a long time ago. Turns out that government work didn't produce a product accurate enough for private enterprise (they claimed they dumbed it down for the general public), so other companies came up with better mousetraps and now I can hold a GPS unit in the palm of my hand on the pitching deck of a small sailboat and navigate my way around a famously foggy bay.

Sweet!