On Monday morning I was tooling down the road toward Manning, South Carolina, which is a little less than one hundred miles from my home. The deposition was set to begin at ten o'clock. It was a beautiful day and since I had plenty of time to reach my destination, I stopped at one of our lovely roadside rest areas to stretch my legs and freshen up.

As I exited the ladies room and headed for my car, I saw a female employee of the Palmetto State polishing one of the glass doors leading to the parking lot. She looked up and caught my eye, so naturally I give her a big smile and said "Good morning!"

Got GPS?

She sort of smiled back but instead of returning my greeting, she waved her cleaning rag and told me I was going the wrong way.

Huh?

I looked through the sparkling door. Grass. Trees. Picnic tables. Trash barrels. A person walking a dog.

No cars.

A concrete picnic table wouldn't get me to Manning; I knew that right off. I've never learned to drive one. And I figured the dog probably wasn't fast enough.

I laughed when I realized -- pretty quickly, I am happy to report -- that I'd turned the wrong way out of the ladies room door. I thanked the nice worker for pointing out my error, did a one-eighty, and there was my car sitting right where I had left it.

What a relief! I'm fairly ditzy and consequently do not take serendipitous outcomes lightly.

I was a couple of feet out into the sunshine when a man in front of me on the sidewalk turned around and grinned real big.

"Get confused comin' outta there, didja?" He asked in a friendly way.

"Yeah, story of my life," I admitted. "If there's a hard way to do a thing, I'll find it."

"You got GPS?" he wanted to know.

To find my way back to my car from the ladies room? Uhm, no.

I told him I was usually the last woman in the Western Hemisphere to acquire new technology, and that I still relied on MapQuest to get me where I needed to go in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and even points beyond.

Assume nothing.

He gestured in the direction of his vehicle, which turned out to be a white van. "I deliver caskets, and I couldn't do it without my GPS," he assured me.

I glanced at the van and could see through the back windows that there were indeed a couple of caskets nestled cozily there.

"I got mine at the pawn shop," he said.

I assumed he meant his GPS and not a casket, but I figured I'd best make sure. "A Garmin?" I asked him. (Even I know Garmin makes GPS's and not coffins.)

"Yeah, a Garmin," he said. "My daughter-in-law stole a bunch of our stuff and pawned it awhile ago, and when I went to get some of it back, the GPS caught my eye. Best hundred fifty dollars I ever spent. You should tell your husband to get you one."

Duly noted. Next time TG and I visit a hock shop (which will be the first time), I'll check out the GPS units. I may even ask if they happen to have a casket, because in this "terrible" economy and pigs flying (swine flew!) all over the place distributing potentially deadly cooties, you never know when you might need a bargain-basement deal on a coffin.

I located Manning without incident and without a GPS, by the way ... found it sleepy and charming as ever, "Matchless for Beauty and Hospitality" ... right where it's been since 1856.

And while "Assume Nothing" is my sometime-mantra, I assume the caskets were delivered right on schedule as well. Wherever they ended up, I hope they sit empty for a long, long time.