In era of navigation apps, it still requires some interpretation

Mrs. Brad and I were driving in an unfamiliar town, using the Waze navigation app on my phone to find a restaurant.

I almost missed a turn when my phone said, "turn right in point-one miles" and I didn't hear the word "point." Fortunately, Mrs. Brad yelled at me and we turned before I crashed into the dead-end barrier. ("But there's a mile to go!")

Then we approached a fork in the road and the voice on the app was mute.

"Turn here?" I asked.

No answer from the phone nor from Mrs. Brad. I moved into the left lane.

"Turn here?"

No answer.

I began to merge right to go straight.

"Keep going!" she shouted.

I completed my merge into the right lane.

"No. Keep going! Keep turning!"

I swerved back, making the left turn at a rate faster than the engineers planned.

"You said keep going," I said, sternly.

"I know what I said. I meant to keep turning."

We sat silently, her wondering why I can't drive, me wondering why she can't navigate.

Making that partnership work is a true test of a relationship, even in the age of GPS devices.

Most couples can identify which combination works best for them in an unfamiliar area: Who should drive and who should navigate (if necessary). Opposites attract and all that.

For Mrs. Brad and me, it's obvious: She's a better driver, I'm a better navigator. Which made that recent incident difficult.

My lack of driving skill is legendary, including three in-garage wrecks. I tell people I'm better than before, but that's likely wishful thinking.

However, I'm good at directions. Whether with old-fashioned maps ("you're coming up on the exit to downtown Chico, which you want to pass, but there's another exit in about a mile that you'll take") or interpreting Waze or Google's navigation system ("Get into the right lane. You'll take a right, then a left in about two blocks."), I can lead Mrs. Brad to the right place. It's one of the few things at which I'm better than her. (Others: shouting out "Jeopardy" answers, ironing, making pancakes.)

Mrs. Brad is a better driver and needs less navigation. She remembers where people live, where restaurants are and where states are without looking at a map.

Yet there we were, Mrs. Brad giving directions and me driving like I was in a slow-motion Grand Prix race, swerving from lane to lane. We arrived and laughed.

I guess the best solution is to stay in your lane, both literally and figuratively.

Do what you do best, let your partner do what they do best.

Anytime we're going somewhere unfamiliar, Mrs. Brad should drive and I should navigate (and check on sports news on my phone).

The development of GPS devices (constantly updating your arrival ETA, explanations of delays, suggestions to bypass slowdowns) is one of the magical events of the past 25 years, but it didn't change the fact that unless you're relying strictly on the vocalization of directions from a smartphone app, somebody has to anticipate turns and somebody has to drive.

If you can navigate your way to an unfamiliar restaurant in a new town without getting in a major fight, you can probably navigate the rest of your relationship.

However, it's not a bad idea to define what "keep going" means before you come up on a fork in the road.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

A modest proposal to make fire names memorable

Does the hurricane industry have more organizational structure than the wildfire industry?

Are they even industries?

Organizational structure is the only reason I can come up with concerning my biggest question about fires. Not how they start, how they spread, why they seem worse every year or who's to blame.

I want to know why the naming convention for fires is so strange.

Quick: What was the name of the massive fire last fall that burned thousands of structures in Sonoma County? Or the Oakland Hills fire in 1991 that killed 25 people? How about the one earlier this month in Shasta County?

My guess is you don't know the official name of at least two of them. (Answers: Sonoma had the Tubbs Fire and the Nuns Fire; the Oakland Hills fire was officially called the Tunnel Fire and the Shasta County fire was the Carr Fire. If you got the latter, it's probably because it was coincidentally started by a car).

Now, what was the name of the hurricane that wiped out New Orleans in 2005? Hurricane Katrina!

You remember because hurricanes have a cool naming convention (first names, going through the alphabet in order) and fires are named after an often-obscure region or landmark near where they start.

The Tubbs Fire got its name because it started near Tubbs Lane. The Tunnel Fire was near Tunnel Road. The Nuns Fire and Carr Fire were named after the people who started them. (That's not true, but we don't know it intuitively, because wildfires are apparently named by a cartographer who finds the most obscure area or road nearby and makes the name official.)

I have a modest proposal: Let each state create a similar naming convention for wildfires to the National Hurricane Center's policy for hurricanes.

With a twist: Instead of people's names, we use musical acts.

Granted, it won't make the fires any better (and to be clear, I'm not minimizing the impact of the fires. No need to repeat my 2014 Flight 370 debacle), but it will make them easier to remember.

You start with the ABBA Fire and continue through the alphabet. The Bachman-Turner Overdrive Fire, the Cab Calloway Fire, the Dr. Dre Fire . . . all the way through the Ziggy Marley Fire. Then you start again.

There are so many musical artists whose names start with each letter that you won't run out, even though we average nearly 5,000 wildfires per year in California. If you combine solo artists and bands, you've got enough to cover any year.

What's the benefit? Awareness and a shared language.

When we talk about major events, we need an immediate way to identify them. World War I was called "the war to end all wars," "the great war" "the war of nations" and more. Finally (presumably after the launch of the sequel), it became World War I. So when you talk about it,  you don't have to say, "you know, the great war. The one that ran from 1914 to 1918 in Europe. Remember that?"

That's how we describe wildfires: the general area, how big it was, when it happened and how destructive.

The Mendocino Complex Fire? How about the Manfred Mann Fire?

The 2015 Valley Fire? How about the Van Halen Fire?

The 2012 Rush Fire in Lassen County? Well . . . that one can keep its name. It's a fire-naming miracle: A blaze named after a group that's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

We just need to recognize that one band should be left out: The name Chicago Fire is already taken by the conflagration started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow. But the rest? Let's make them easier to remember.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

On behalf of Cubicle Nation: Leave us alone

Your initial reaction is correct: The traditional way of doing offices is better.

When it comes to creating a climate for collaboration and teamwork, it turns out that one of the start-up culture's coolest ideas was wrong: Open concept offices don't work.

Long live the cubicle! Long live the office!

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

According to a variety of sources, about 70 percent of American offices are now "open concept," meaning they are comprised of rows of tables and computers. No cubicles or partitions. That design was created to encourage collaboration, openness, interaction, teamwork and ideas. Except it has the opposite effect.

A study from the Harvard Business School shows that face-to-face interaction decreased by 72 percent when the office was redesigned to create an open concept.

That study isn't unique. Multiple studies show that in an open-concept office, employees become less productive, more likely to be sick and more distracted.

The reasons are pretty obvious – and would likely be to the "innovators" who came up with the idea, had they ever worked in an office or talked to someone who had.

Speaking for Cubicle Nation, I say this: Put us together at a table and we become distracted, more likely to put on headphones or earbuds and more likely to communicate electronically.

What's worse, everyone can see us checking Facebook or ESPN.com during work hours, so we do more emailing and IMing with coworkers to hide that. Talk to the person? Not when I can email him.

This is in my wheelhouse. I have worked in Cubicle Nation for a long time. One of my best pals is nearby, but plenty of other co-workers are forced to listen in as I opine on issues of the day and do various impersonations.

I walk around the office a lot and check in with others. I insist it's for morale.

But . . .

The cubicle gives me a modicum of privacy. Put me in a non-walled room with other employees and I would likely treat work as a solo project. Why should I go talk to someone if I can hear them chewing their tuna sandwich across the table?

For probably 90 percent of my working days, I've lived in a cubicle. It makes sense.

If you take away cubicles (again, 70 percent of offices subscribe to the failed "open concept" approach), where do you post pictures of  your family? Where do you keep the Will Clark baseball cards? Where do you place the Post-It notes with various predictions (concerning the future of Justin Bieber, how many games the 49ers will win in 2018, when will be Paul Ryan's last day as Speaker of the House, what day the office blinds will be cleaned)? How do you keep people from seeing that you're updating your fantasy baseball team roster on company time?

The open-office concept doesn't work because humans want at least the myth of privacy.

Consider your last trip to a library or to a Starbucks when you wanted to read or study or learn: Did you go to a crowded table so you could hear others? Of course not. You wanted privacy, even in public.

So yes, I'll shout what the start-up culture doesn't know and considers outdated: Thank God for cubicles.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

How your iPhone shows that you're richer than me

Android users, unite! Fight the 1 percent!

(Is that still a thing? Is mentioning the "1 percent" similar to saying "Occupy iPhone" or "Fight the iPhone Power?" I digress.)

If you have an Android smartphone, you are part of the unwashed masses. iPhones are the leading symbol of wealth in our nation.

That's according to research from economists at the University of Chicago, who published a paper with the National Bureau of Economic Research that focused on how consumer behavior and media consumption affects how we infer demographic information.

In other words, the research reveals how we filter information about others: What types of things make us (accurately) think someone is, in this case, wealthy.

The answer is . . . iPhones.

According to the data, the one individual brand that was most "predictive of being high-income" in 2016 was owning an iPhone. The ownership of said phones led researchers to a have a 69 percent chance to correctly identify the owners as being in the top 25 percent of income for their household type.

In other words, iPhones generally predict that a person is wealthy.

This is the continuation of a decade-old brainwashing by the folks at Apple, who managed to convince the masses that their products mean that you're cool and wealthy and ahead of the game. Disagree with me? Of course. Because you have been brainwashed and have an iPhone, Rockefeller!

By the way, the No. 2 indicator of wealth was owning an iPad.

Android was the fourth-leading indicator, so maybe that's significant, but maybe not. Look it up on your iPhone, moneybags. I'm busy trying to scratch out a living.

There were similar studies in 1992 and 2004. In 1992, the top product to predict wealth was an automatic dishwasher and the top brand was Grey Poupon Dijon mustard. Seriously.

In 2004, buying a new vehicle was the the top "product" to show wealth and Land O'Lakes Regular butter was the top brand.

Yes, Land O'Lakes Regular butter. Try not to get it on your iPhone, fat cat.

I prefer the old-timey way to tell if someone is wealthy: They lounge in a bathtub full of gold coins, like Scrooge McDuck. Or they use $100 bills to light their Cuban cigars.

But in 2016, the way to show off your wealth was to have an iPhone.

Interestingly – or perhaps not – the top label associated with wealth doesn't have the largest market share of smartphones. Of course, you already know that as you drive your luxury car and eat caviar, right?

According to the latest information I could find (I used my Android phone, so I probably don't have access to the same kind of information that an iPhone user would see), the Android operating system has 54 percent of the U.S. market, while the iPhone has 44 percent. Makes sense. The rich minority.

By the way, among the rest of the market is Microsoft and Blackberry. You probably had a Blackberry before you got your iPhone, Daddy Warbucks.

Anyway, this information provides another forum for culture wars. Red states vs. blue states. Urban vs. rural. Hot dogs vs. hamburgers. Dick Sargent vs. Dick York.

And now we have the elite iPhoners vs. the rest of us, the salt-of-the-Earth Android users.

Enjoy your iPhone, tycoon. Remember what the Apostle Paul said in the Bible: "The love of money is the root of all sorts of evil."

I confirmed that on my Android, where I have my Bible app.

Now I just have to work on my jealousy of rich people and their iPhones.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.