Voice of Authority

I know, I know, I know - many weeks, no blog - but life has got kind of busy. Apologies. But thank you to those who asked for the next instalment! Glad to know you are out there.

Random thought – what voice did you choose for your Sat Nav? It struck me the other day that this choice tells a very interesting story. Actually my Sat Nav did physically strike me as I tried – mid travel, of course, running late for a meeting - to retrieve Sat Nav from glove compartment and stick it to windscreen bypassing the essential ‘lick’ bit of the ‘lick, stick, suction’ process. This ensured it dropped down hard on my knee at the next hard right hand corner. Nice. I finally conceded, pulled in to a lay-by and positioned it correctly and sent my man ‘Ken’ off to find details of how to get to my next appointment.

Now ‘Ken’, my in car logistics assistant, is a rather authoritarian Australian. I choose this out of 20 potential voices as I deemed it to be the one that I would actually listen to. Yes, it’s true. I am so pedantic I would negate the information of a Sat Nav whose voice didn’t have sufficient gravitas. So I chose the voice that most closely resembles……my father! Scary stuff although he (Dad not Ken) will be pleased. It’s taken 38 years and I am finally listening to him…..or a replica at least.

That got me to thinking – for what reason do other people choose theirs? One of my drivers has an Irish lady (reminds him of a softly spoken school teacher he had a crush on), other’s have quite a harsh Welsh lady – which apparently has had a real uptake since the appearance of the Vanessa character on 'Gavin and Stacey'. You can imagine it can’t you, ‘At the end of the day, when all said and done, that’s a right you need to be taking. Lush’.

Funnily enough I have a dominatrix friend who had a brainwave about recording a voice over for a Sat Nav but I had to tell her I thought it would be a bit counterproductive – any man who fancied a bit of that would be purposefully going off course to get the bollocking. My Ken’s calm, ‘Turn around when possible’ would be replaced by ‘I said RIGHT you simpering little idiot, TURN AROUND’. They could be getting lost on purpose for ages!

So what have you got as your voice on your Sat Nav and why? I am intrigued….