Spooky

When I shifted to  Android last November, the first thing I noticed was the preinstalled Google Maps.  This was quite a pleasant  welcome for me, being someone with "faulty GPS", aka, poor sense of direction.

Since then I became fond of Google Maps, even turning it on while travelling from home to familiar places like the office or the nearby mall. I love the calm and reassuring voice that comes with the app. I also love the fact that the app can tell me how much time it'd take me to reach a destination. Pretty handy when planning meetings

Everything about Google Maps was cool for me. There were one or two instances though where I almost drove against traffic because the app didn't tell me I was heading towards a one-way road. But other than that, everything was good.

Until last Tuesday.

I needed to go to the ICTO office to attend a startup competition where I, along with two other colleagues, had to mentor the final contestants from Cebu. I was given an address via email, but since I wasn’t familiar with the street name that was given, I turned to Google Maps. It told me the office was somewhere in SM, near Raddison Blu.

I arrived in SM at around 8 am. Since the event was to start at 8:30, I thought I was safe. But then almost 2 hours had passed already and I still couldn’t find the building that was in the map. I was led to this parking lot near Raddison Blu.  But the place was almost empty. I talked to the guards and all three of them shook their heads. There was no ICTO office there--nothing except a few cars and Raddison behind it.

It was spooky. I remember an old story my aunt would tell me when I was a kid.  In Biliran Island, there is a place near a village where sailors get stranded all the time for weird reasons. When asked, they'd say they saw a landing dock and a bustling town filled with lights. The villagers would just shake their heads in amazement. There was nothing there. Just a cemetery.

Well... Anyways, back to my Google Maps story. The ending was, I was late for two hours. The first two teams had already delivered their pitches when I arrived. There was only one team left for me to check. I felt really guilty. I had to schedule one-on-one mentoring sessions with the teams I missed the day after.

Huge lessons learned there.

​One: Don't trust Google Maps 100%.
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Two: If you go want to go to ICTO Cebu, just go to Plaza Independencia. Their office is in one of the buildings near there. 

Three: Be more early. :) and 

Four: Double check the venue with the organizers.