Absurdity
MapQuest Surges To Number One App By Refusing To Call Lake Ontario 'Lake America'
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
MapQuest, a company that has not been culturally relevant since the invention of the smartphone, is currently the number one navigation app in the United States, a sentence that required three editors to confirm before publication.
The app surged past Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps this week after its parent company issued a one-paragraph statement declining to comply with a presidential executive order directing all domestic mapping services to relabel Lake Ontario as 'Lake America' on their platforms, effective immediately.
The statement read, in full: 'Lake Ontario is called Lake Ontario.'
By Thursday morning, MapQuest had been downloaded fourteen million times. By Thursday afternoon, its servers had begun responding to route requests with directions that were, according to multiple users, 'pretty good actually, although it wanted me to take a toll road.'
Google Maps complied with the order within six hours, quietly pushing an update that replaced 'Lake Ontario' with 'Lake America' on all views except satellite, where the lake continues to exist as it has for approximately ten thousand years, indifferent to branding.
Apple Maps complied within four hours, which users only discovered because Apple Maps briefly routed several drivers directly into Lake America.
Waze took a different approach, announcing it would rename the lake 'Lake America' but would still refer to it verbally in navigation prompts as 'the big wet part,' which legal counsel described as 'a good-faith effort.'
Long-dormant MapQuest accounts were reactivated at a rate that overwhelmed the company's customer service infrastructure, which is a single email address that forwards to a Gmail account managed by a man named Todd in Englewood, Colorado.
'Todd is doing his best,' a company spokesperson said.
Users who downloaded the app this week reported a mixed but enthusiastic experience. Many noted that MapQuest still defaults to printing directions, a feature no one asked it to retain, and that the estimated drive times appear to have been calculated during a period in American history when there was significantly less traffic.
'It told me my commute would take eleven minutes,' said Denver resident Patricia Howell, 43. 'It took forty. But I felt good about myself the whole time.'
Others expressed admiration for what they described as the app's principled stance, though several admitted they had not actually thought about Lake Ontario before this week and were uncertain which of the Great Lakes it was.
'It's the one that isn't Lake America,' said Marcus Graft, 31, of Cincinnati, who gave the app five stars despite it routing him through a road that no longer exists.
A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which is overseeing enforcement of the renaming order, said the agency was 'reviewing all options available under existing federal mapping statutes,' a phrase that every person who heard it understood to mean nothing.
Canada, which also borders Lake Ontario, issued a brief statement noting that it would continue to call the lake Lake Ontario, and that it appreciated everyone's interest in the lake and hoped they were doing okay.
MapQuest's stock, which trades on a very small exchange under a ticker symbol most analysts had to look up, rose four hundred percent.
Todd is reportedly taking the weekend off.
The story we are making fun of: https://theonion.com/mapquest-jumps-to-top-of-app-store-after-refusing-to-rename-lake-ontario/