February 2nd, 2008

Best nerd prank... ever!

So, I quite often make fun of my girlfriend - especially of her car, a Ford Ka. There’s nothing wrong with it per sé, but it’s quite a lot slower than my car.

Anyway, today I’m going to Portsmouth (about 90 miles away) and she’s going to work (about 2 miles away from her) and it turns out that we’re leaving our respective homes at around the same time. I joked “Ha, I’ll still arrive before you!” and immediately got to work on the prank.

The premise was that Google Maps has introduced a “Choose your Vehicle” feature, that’ll adjust your journey time based on the performance of the chosen vehicle.

Here’s the resulting journey to her work in my car:

RX-8 Journey time

… and in hers:

RX-8 Journey time

Needless to say, she fell for it - being annoyed that Google would’ve got the data for her car so wrong. The best comment: “According to that i drive an RX8 to work and uni!”

Prank successful!

Oh, and she’ll never forgive me for this.