White City To East Acton Via North Kensington…& Madagascar!, FoodCycle, 2 August 2020

We ended up pursuing a rather convoluted route this Sunday for our East Acton FoodCycle run.

FoodCycle provide us with an excellent app, Circuit For Teams, which does a wonderful job of listing our drops, linking to the satnav & optimising our route.

But this week something had changed. It might have had something to do with my upgraded iPhone. Circuit is now offering us a choice of satnavs, which is great, because we both like (and are used to) Waze, whereas it was previously hard-linked to GoogleMaps, which we like less.

But here’s the thing.

It seems that, in amongst all the upgrading excitement, but unbeknown to us, the app had switched on some functions that allow the app to take instructions by voice, using Siri, Apple’s voice control gizmo.

Early in our journey that day, Janie and I were chatting about travel, or rather our much diminished desire to travel at the moment. Janie pondered where we might want to go if/when the pandemic is over and we thus discussed Madagascar, where we were planning to go in 2018, until an outbreak of pneumonic plague there in late 2017 rather put us off the idea. (In the end, we went to Japan instead, in autumn 2018.)

After the first drop, the Circuits app seemed to be in a spin of re-routing and re-optimising. No matter, I thought, I know the way from White City to North Kensington for this second drop.

But the app was still in a spin ahead of the third drop:

… it keeps saying “route not possible”…

…said Janie, to which I merely said:

…ask it to re-optimise again – I know the way to our third drop anyway.

But Janie kept reporting that the app was failing to show a route for our journey and after our third drop, we were heading to Hammersmith to a new location and I really did want the app to show me the way…

…so I took a close look at the thing myself…

…the app had added “Madagascar” to the list of destinations and was trying (and for some obscure reason, failing) to route us to Hammersmith via Madagascar.

At this juncture I was reminded of the scene in the animated film, Madagascar, after the penguins have taken control of the ship in a “special forces style” operation, only to realise that they have absolutely no idea how to use the ship’s navigation systems. That scene is 1’40” into the clip below, all of which is well worth watching.

Much like the penguins, I tried pressing buttons to see what happens – in particular I thought it might be a good idea to remove Madagascar from the list of FoodCycle delivery destinations.

That worked. Once I deleted Madagascar and pressed “reoptimize route”, within a second or two, order had been restored and Circuits was again performing as expected and showing an excellent route for our deliveries.

Thus, in the next hour or 90 minutes, it was mission accomplished. Hurrah.

Because, when we have a lot of food to deliver for FoodCycle…

…we like to move it, move it…

…we like to move it, move it…