I call him TimTim

Careful readers will recall that I received a TomTom from Husband for Valentine's Day after shamelessly begging for one for months.

I was planning on programming it with a female voice. We were going to be girlfriends, and she was going to direct me to my destinations in a nondirective way. But then clever blogger Jordan pointed out that there is a very nice British male voice available by the name of Tim.

I was determined that I had to have him, even if it meant logging into the TomTom website and pretending I was a resident of the U.K. so I could download him, which really taxed my technological capabilities. But I have him now, the object being to feel like I have

him ordering me about in my car. Probably not what Husband had in mind, but I was very pleased. "Turn right," Clive TimTim would say, and I would.

Until this morning, when we had sort of a falling out. It was my morning to drive carpool to Sophie's school, which is about 25 minutes from our house in a rural redwood-forested canyon. We were in trouble right off the bat. He told me to go right, and I went left. I disobeyed!! This apparently floored him. He was speechless for several minutes, the display on the screen looking like I was driving into oblivion. The carpool kids loved it. "You've ditched him!!!" Hence, the name of our new carpool game: Ditch TimTim. Better than Twenty Questions any day. But TimTim rebounded. After a minute or so he found us, and proceeded with a new set of instructions from where we were, ignoring the fact that I had blown him off only moments before. But I could not contain myself—I disobeyed again, and again, and AGAIN. And it was fun to see how long it took him to find me after each time.

Turns out that whereas I'm sure TimTim is quite the man on city streets, he's pretty lame in rural areas. He doesn't know, for example, that a road that is usually part of the quickest route to school has been covered by a mudslide for months. Or that taking a different freeway offramp than what he recommends avoids shopping district traffic. The kids would have loved his instruction to me on the way home from school: "Turn around as soon as possible." I did not, and it took him the longest ever to find me, give in, and agree to my way.

Our verdict: Not very useful for this drive, but enormously entertaining. But I'm not mad at him and am still thinking about buying him a cute little outfit, which he will wear because I say so.