Google Maps - Grrrrr...

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I spent much of the weekend before last making wedding invitations. A few weeks ago as we were on the way to church I made a mental note of the route, so that I could turn it into directions to put in the invitations. One of the instructions was 'turn onto the B3335 St Cross Road'. Before we printed all the invitations the other weekend I thought I had better just check that the route as I'd remembered it was correct, so I looked on Google Maps. I found that the B3335 was actually marked as the B3355 - I figured that as the numbers were all 3s and 5s, I had probably remembered it wrongly, and changed the third 3 to a 5, remarking to Mum that it was a good job I'd double-checked before printing out 80 invitations.

Can you guess where I'm going with this? On the way to church last Sunday I had another look at the road signs, and it turns out that the road is, in fact, the B3335 and not the B3355 as designated on Google Maps.

So I have 80 bits of card with the wrong directions on them. I've been to buy new card and the options now are: -

1. Post card to Dad, get him to print off more directions, cut them to size and post them back to me;
2. Buy an ink-jet printer and re-print them all myself;
3. Find someone with an ink-jet printer and persuade them to let me borrow it for a couple of hours;
4. Amend all the cards by hand;
5. Buy a can of black paint, go to Winchester in the middle of the night and change all the road signs to B3355.

At the moment, I'm thinking option 5 is the easiest. If I pick option 2 or 3 I'll need to get my hands on a copy of MS Office before I can do anything, or learn enough about desktop publishing to re-create the info in a different program.

After seeing that the road was marked wrongly on Google Maps, I checked Multimap and that was also wrong. Rob said as the map sites all get their data from Navteq, it was likely that Navteq's data was wrong, but I checked Navteq and it's correct on there, so I guess some feeb in a dark office somewhere has just copied the number down wrongly. And cost me quite a lot of time and money. No wonder there's a disclaimer attached to everything these days.