The lady’s voice was level and controlled, but I knew that privately she was seething. It was the fifth time that evening I had changed plans without notice.

“Get back onto the ramp and proceed south on I-95,” she said. I sensed a heavy sigh at the end of it.

“Coffee,” I told her. “I need another cup of coffee.”

There was no reply. But that silence was heavy. I knew she wanted to admonish me for overindulgence in highway coffee and for mucking up the schedule again.

“Do you want anything while I’m in there?” I asked her.

She said nothing.

So, it’s roughly a 10-hour drive from Maine to Maryland, but I wanted to make it in nine. The route should be a straight one down the East Coast, but of course, it’s never that simple. You have to get off this highway and onto that one. You have to choose a bridge over the Hudson River and decide what the hell you want to do about Delaware, with its 3 miles of highway and 40 toll booths.

My wife was along for the ride, but who needed her? To this point, I had been guided by the patient, schoolteacher voice of the navigator lady I had come to know as Miss Beasley.

I love the woman. She never raised her voice even when I went sailing past an off-ramp I was supposed to take to the next leg of the trip.

“Proceed another 2 miles and then exit at Revere Road and reconnect with I-84,” she said calmly, restraining the urge to call me a bonehead or any other terms of disdain she keeps in her private lexicon.

It got so I felt guilty every time I pulled into another rest area. I knew Miss Beasley was vigilant about my every stop and turn. But was she so advanced that she could pick up on deeper things about me as I picked stops at random and made fast decisions based on nothing?

“Are you peeing again, Mark?” Miss Beasley might have asked me at the stop along the Garden State Parkway. “Perhaps you should have your prostate checked.”

Let’s face it: Every facet of the human body can be monitored by a machine. We’ve invited them to do so. Alert me when it’s time to get to the meeting. Tell me how long it’s been since my last cigarette. How’s my blood sugar looking today, HAL? Any problems there?

The navigator came installed with the Motorola Droid my wife had picked out. It’s so easy to use, it’s startling. “I am leaving from this address. I wish to go to that address in Edgewater, Md. Can you help a brother out?”

Miss Beasley put together the travel plan so quickly and efficiently, it was like having a savant perched on my dashboard.

“It is not polite to stare up your navigator’s skirt, Mark. Please keep your eyes on the road.”

Five or six years ago, I wrote a column about my utter inability to navigate the back roads outside Lewiston. The column sparked outrage from a pair of women in Naples who felt I was making fun of small-town folk. The scary ladies got together and fired off a letter to the paper so hot that two editors suffered burns to their fingers.

But I wasn’t making fun of small-town folk, with their hounds and shotguns and rusted washing machines sinking into their front lawns. I was ridiculing myself because I couldn’t follow even simple directions. It was a mostly harmless flaw, quirky and almost endearing.

But quirky and endearing have no place in a world of computer precision. People who can’t spell for crap have spellcheck. Those who can’t face others in the real world have Facebook and Twitter. People who can’t find their way from one end of a town to another have global positioning navigators.

Our gadgets tell us what books we probably want to buy from Amazon. They suggest music based on our previous listening habits. You can program a refrigerator to tell you when you’re low on milk and eggs and there is software that will point out the various ways in which you are messing up your life. Every component of your life that needs managing, you can find an application to handle it.

“You need more vegetables in your diet, Mark,” Miss Beasley will tell me someday, when I’m on the road and all of those life-enhancing programs have been brought together. “By the way, did you see how that girl with the tramp stamp was checking you out at Sbarro’s? I TOLD you that V-neck sweater was right for you.”

There are people who resist the growing involvement of computers in our lives and those who completely embrace it. The embracing types will probably be allowed to live a little longer as organic beings when the machines take over.

Me, I’m in the middle. I like the conveniences, but I still value the beauty that is a human flaw enough to want to keep a few around. I’ll have to run that thought by Miss Beasley to see what she thinks. We’ve become very close, you know. So close, that I find it necessary to keep some aspects of our relationship from my wife.

Fortunately, there’s an app for that.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can ask about his apps at [email protected].