I bet the ladies in our lives thought the problem of us guys refusing to ask for directions was solved.

Ha!

I admit that it sounds logical. Guys love technology. We were enthralled with the first pull of the See ’N Say in our cribs and have been filling our spaces with gadgets and gears ever since. If it’s electronic, we want it.

GPS navigational systems are electronic technology. There are buttons, pictures, a pointer arrow and voice that tells what the picture is.

A GPS is a See ’N Say for our cribs on wheels.

Obviously, publicly asking for directions is an affront to our maleness (or “idiotic ego,” as I hear female friends mislabel it). We know that we can find it by ourselves even if we’ve never been there before, don’t know the address and have forgotten the name of the place we’re going.

Besides, think what it does to our confidence if the women we have sworn to impress think that strangers know more than we do? And are able to prove it, I mean.

I met a guy who once spent five days looking for a swank restaurant he heard about in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, before finally settling for a Burger King in Butte, Montana, where he had somehow arrived. His date stumbled out of his car, said yes, this definitely was the place she meant to go to with him, then accidentally stepped into a passing cab.

He hasn’t seen her since. He figures she got lost without his skills, most likely.

So our sweet ladies figure, “Hey, GPS – it’s guys, technology and directions all crammed together in one space. No one will know he’s asking for directions, so now he will and we’ll get there!”

Again, I say, ha!

We didn’t believe our See ’N Says when they said “The cow goes mooooo.” After a little dismantling and reconfiguring, the cows on our See ’N Says said “oink, oink” and sometimes “quack, quack, quack.”

Naturally, a recent survey published by Reuters shows that 83 percent of all guys regularly ignore the directions offered by their GPS systems anyway.

This is because of that other great male trait – knowing shortcuts. Every guy knows a shortcut that would have gotten you there five minutes faster even if he’s never been there before, doesn’t know the address or has forgotten the name of the place where you said you went.

I set out for my mailbox one day when my brother-in-law insisted he knew a shortcut that would get me there five minutes quicker. I was walking a straight line from the front porch to the postal post and the trip takes 17 seconds, but he said it anyway. He couldn’t help himself. It’s just what we do. (His shortcut took 6 minutes and 23 seconds. But I figured a way to get it down to 4 minutes and 12 seconds.)

Besides, we guys know that the GPS often is wrong. A mapping program once tried to send me down a road that had been replaced by an Army base way back during World War II.

But it was OK. I knew a shortcut. And only 36 hours later, I got my wife to the party that was 23 miles from our house. See, Honey, I told you I didn’t need to ask for directions.

Say, could you pull the string on that See ’N Say for me? The cow whinnies now, but I know a quick way to fix it.