Surreality

Emp_Fab · July 2016

I've just spent a happy hour sat in my niece's Honda Civic, shouting at it in Spanish. I can't speak Spanish, which is a disadvantage when you want to shout at something in Spanish. Somehow, she had managed to get her car's default language to be Spanish. Her Sat-Nav system uses a DVD drive in the glovebox and relies on this to boot all sorts of stuff, or so it would appear. Her screen just says "DVD Read Error", and will not budge off that, so you can't change language using the screen menus. My only option was to use the voice-recognition system.

However, the car only recognises the language it's currently set to, so without a screen, the only way to do it is to navigate through the menus in Spanish (thank God it wasn't set to German - I'd have had no chance!).

Picture me sat in a hot car saying "cambiar idioma" and the car replying "Perdon ?" for 45 minutes. I even tried getting Google Translate on my phone to speak to the car in Spanish without success, and then it struck me as quite surreal that here I was, trying to get two computers to talk to each other in Spanish and swearing at the two of them in English, in a car.

Strange days indeed.