GATES NC – Gerald Stokely was hauling hogs on his way to the market when his GPS started acting up in the middle of Gates County. He couldn’t believe what he saw, stating “The whole gaw dern Gates County was missing. I looked on my phone at the GPS and a giant ass question mark showed up. I ain’t got time to be gallivantin’ around this here county, I got to get these here hogs to the Chinese, er, I mean Smithfield, ‘fore they stop using hogs altogether!”
What Stokely experienced was rampant, as news quickly spread that Gates County had disappeared off the face of the Earth, according to Google Maps.
“I ain’t got no reception down there t’start wit’, I reckon Google ain’t neever, and figured won’t no place there,” said Franklin resident Howard Holmes. “I don’ know who in the hell would wanna go down there no way. My damn mother-in-law tricked me into going that way one year to the beach. Woman got us smack dab in the middle of that damn county when a tire blew. Ain’t no shop for miles, and she ain’t exactly a looker, so won’t no good Samaritans trying to help her out to start with. Damn woman looks like Herman Munster.”
The Google outage had zero impact on Gates County.
“We have a community that is pretty independent from the ways of modern technology,” said Gates County official, Benjamin Buford Gates, III. “Many of our residents don’t have internet, cell phones, or many other common amenities of today’s society, and are pretty used to not being connected to the rest of the world.”
Google spokesman Ima Feelen-Luckie commented on the erasure, stating: “We at Google have a stringent process in maintaining our maps, and in our sweeps of the world at large, found the reception in this particular area, to drop out to the point that we’d have better luck fielding a phone call on the moon. At which point, we made the decision that surely no one lives in such inhospitable locales, and subsequently removed the area from our Maps. We do not apologize for this erasure, nor will we ever. It is in our opinion that motorists just drive around this amorphous blob on your maps now, as we cannot guarantee your safety, or pinpoint your location, should you be abducted by anything you may have seen in Deliverance, Wrong Turn, or anything from West Virginia. Thank you for choosing Google to be your GPS.”
Officials believe that with Google’s current stance on the matter, along with Gates County’s overall unawareness of the issue, that the County will remain hidden for decades – possibly centuries – continuing the long held tradition of carefully avoiding Gates.