Are we there yet?

Faced with discrepancies between her requests for mileage reimbursement and MapQuest mileage calculations for the same trips, a South Carolina social worker did what many of us have done: She blamed the technology.

Adeline Yon initially refused to explain to her bosses why or how she’d consistently requested to be reimbursed for driving miles that were in excess of the MapQuest numbers.

This led to her being fired – a development that she seemed to take pretty well at the time.

After learning that she’d lost her job, “Yon proceeded to depart the meeting by standing up, holding her hands over her head, saying ‘Thank the Lord, I am free,’ and hugging” her bosses, according to an order from U.S. District Court Judge J. Michelle Childs of Orangeburg.

But Yon turned around and filed a wrongful termination grievance against her former employer, The Regional Medical Center, and noted that MapQuest’s own copyright information stated that MapQuest “should not be used for the purpose of accuracy and further states the reason why the system is inaccurate.”

Anyone who has used web mapping systems or GPS devices knows how infuriatingly inaccurate they can be.

But that didn’t help Yon.

And neither did her assertion that the mileage discrepancy was used as a pretext to fire her because she is black.

Childs, who is African-American as well, found that Yon failed to prove that she was fired because of her race and tossed her complaint.

This is just a guess, but Yon’s case probably wasn’t helped by the fact that the woman who was hired to replace her also is black.