Landrew’s Take on Technology

Imagine that you’re driving to get a burger and it’s getting kind of dark out, so you go to turn your lights on but they don’t work.  You get nervous so you start breathing really heavy and that fogs up all of your windows.  Then you roll down your windows and stick your head out to try and see.  But it turns out you’re driving behind a truck delivering blindfolds to stores, and one of the blindfolds flies out of the truck and wraps around your face!  That sounds pretty dangerous, right?  Well, that’s what it was like for people in boats before the compass was invented, except they didn’t need to worry about on-coming traffic and sometimes there were sharks and cannon balls involved.

You might be like, “The compass?  What the heck is that?  I’ve never even seen one of those things!”  Actually, you probably have!  Think about it: have you ever gone to camping store and seen something that looks like one of those old-school watches with no wrist bands that you put in your pocket?  But when you picked it up you were like, “This thing is totally busted! It only has one arrow that wiggles all the time and four times that are all letters!”?  That was a compass!

The letters were N, S, E and W and they didn’t stand for times.  They stood for ways you could go.  Those ways were North, South, East and West because compasses were used before Up, Down, Right and Left were invented.  People would get confused about which way was which, so they came up with ways to remember using the first letters of all of the directions like “Never Eat Shredded Wheat,” or “Never Eat Soggy Waffles.”  They were always about food because they were made up by hungry people taking trips on old boats and the people running the trips always packed too much shredded wheat and dropped the waffles into the ocean by accident.

It’s fun to make up your own thing to remember which way the directions go on the compass.  Here’s mine: “Not Every Stupid Walrus Nibbles Eggs, Stupid.”  (Mine has more words than the old one because I went around one and a half times.)

We can thank the compass for many of the awesome things that we have today.  For instance, you know when you eat something that your roommate made and it tastes lame, so you put salt on it?  Well, imagine if the explorer who was looking for salt didn’t have a compass: he could have gotten mixed up on his trip (while running away from a bunch of natives, having just taken their hot princess to be his new hot wife) and found a bunch of clay instead.  Then if your food was bland, all you would have to put on it would be clay and that would just make it taste muddy.

The compass is still around today, but it has a sweet screen and it’s called a GPS.  A GPS is way sweeter than an old compass, because it can talk to you, so you kind of can drive blindfolded.