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I have no sense of direction.

On a practical level, this applies when I've driven part of the way to a new dentist's office and I'm standing by my car looking back up the road wondering where I took a wrong turn. You may be thinking, "That's his problem? All this guy needs is a GPS device to help him get places."

I agree. I have one. But what's really troubling me is my lack of that manly sense of knowing at all times which way I'm going.

Use the sun to tell direction, you say? Sure. If the sun is sitting on the horizon and I have a fix on the time of day, I can certainly tell east from west. However, when the sun is just sort of up there in the middle of the sky, I'm stumped. If you asked me which way is north, I would pretend to figure it out by measuring the height of the sun in hand-widths and dividing by 32, or whatever the formula is to convert to the metric system, and end up pointing confidently to Antarctica.

Fortunately, knowing how to tell which way is which is not a skill I have needed since the Boy Scouts, where a scoutmaster once challenged me with, "OK, Bernie, without looking at your compass, show us which way is north." Knowing the outdoorsman lore that moss only grows on the north side of trees was not helpful, because any tree I looked at either had no moss or was green on three sides. Predictably, I never earned a merit badge in direction finding.

Even in my six months of Army reserve duty, nobody asked me to find a direction. In basic training, our platoon might be crawling around in the wilds of Fort Dix hunting for a make-believe enemy, and I never needed to figure out which way to crawl. Instead, Corporal Bruno, the big guy with the stripes and the attitude, would bark, "Go that way" and we would all crawl that way. We trainees always followed directions from someone who outranked us, which was pretty much everybody.

Some people say that with practice, a person can develop a sense of direction. According to University College London, a part of the brain of longtime London taxi drivers -- the part of the brain associated with navigation -- actually gets larger as the drivers learn and remember the 25,000 streets they have to know. I can safely say that my years of driving have not resulted in any changes in my brain other than instilling a keen sense of foreboding every time I start out to a new destination.

No. I need directions, preferably written, not merely spoken by a helpful person leaning in the passenger-side window responding to my distress call, "Excuse me... Excuse me... Can you help me, please? I'm trying to get to...." Then, after listening to the directions twice, I would drive a couple of blocks, and ask myself, Did she say two lefts, then a right at the Wawa, or two rights and a left... but maybe she meant that 7-11 over there, not a Wawa....

The computer sites MapQuest and Google helped with the written directions, and even provided detailed maps, but that worked only if I had my wife next to me navigating. This worked out well enough, except in those cases where I had to hear a frosty, "I said two minutes ago you have to get off the highway at that exit we just passed." This was usually followed by my seeing a highway sign that said, "Next Exit 34 Miles."

But now I have my GPS navigation system. I tell it where I want to go, and through a miraculous combination of satellites in the sky and its own map information, it tells me, turn by turn, in a pleasant female voice, how to reach my destination. "Turn right on Main Street and then left," is soothing to an otherwise wander-prone driver.

The device does have its idiosyncrasies, though. If I accidentally speed past a turn it recommended, the voice gets huffy and says, "Recalculating..." with a tone and inflection communicating its annoyance at having to redo its planning all the time to keep this loser, who can't follow simple directions, on the correct path. In addition, it sometimes gets malicious: last week while I was whizzing along in the middle of the George Washington Bridge it announced that I had arrived at my destination. I just knew all its electrons were lined up in a smile.

Still, a GPS is better than having Corporal Bruno leading the way. It also means that I never again have to commit that most unmanly of acts -- asking directions.

Bernard Jacks is a freelance humor writer who lives in Marlboro.