The Starrenburg’s Website

If you live in Europe and drive a car eventually, unless you have a) a photographic memory and/or b) two heads so you can look at two things at once (a map and the road ahead), you are going to have that awful experience of saying “where the heck are we”. And for those of you old enough to remember the old sitcom comedy F-Troop you’ll wish, like the fictional “we’re the Hekawi” Indians in the show, that you had a GPS navigation system. Well… they didn’t wish they had one… GPS hadn’t even been invented in 1967 let alone 1867, but they sure as heck could have used one.

Well fast forward to 2005, and I have a GPS navigation system in my car, and I love it - it’s the best marriage saver since… well anything. Better than having your own private, on-tap, marriage counsellor sitting in the car with you!

Now while the technology of GPS would have been new to the (native American) Indians, the “forked tongue” double-talk I am experiencing coming out of the supplier of the GPS map navigation software needed for the system would, I believe, be very familiar to them. I am getting the impression that the supplier’s customer service belongs back in the 1860’s.

Here’s the problem. A GPS system obviously needs updated GPS map navigation software - roads are changing all the time and you don’t want to do something like following directions from a GPS system which is using old maps, and drive off the end of an unfinished flyover, or into the sea. So you need to obtain (at some regular interval) updated CDs of navigation maps for your GPS system. Uh oh… enter stage left - TeleAtlas one of the world’s major GPS map navigation suppliers.

When I got my new Ford over a year ago I got a navigation CD for the European country I live in but hey, surprise surpise, it was already out of date back then when I got it. So I contacted the supplier of the naviation map CDs, TeleAtlas, and said “Hi! I’m a new customer and I need an upgrade for my map CD”. “No, we don’t do upgrades” was the reply. OK… I thought, maybe it’s the fact that I work in computer technology and I am familar with the term “upgrade” and these guys aren’t, so let’s try a different tack. “No”, I say, “what I mean is, I have an existing navigation CD that was bundled with the GPS navigation system in my car and I need a newer one, and because I am an existing customer I shouldn’t have to pay full price for the latest one - right?”. “We don’t do upgrades,” was the reply (Ah… so they do understand the word ‘upgrade’) “you’ll have to pay full price for the latest CD each time.” “But I’m an existing customer” I wail “why should I have to pay € 150 per country, per time?”.

I should give you some further background at this stage. Not being able to afford that marriage counsellor I mentioned earlier to drive in the car with us every day, we had purchased the TomTom Navigator GPS system for my old Compaq PocketPC, TomTom was a great solution. I already had multiple maps of Europe for it which I got for a fraction of the price being asked by TeleAtlas, and upgraded all my maps twice at a reduced cost. But here’s the kicker - guess who supplies the navigation maps for the TomTom navigation system? Yep - ‘we don’t do upgrades’ TeleAtlas.

Finally I got tired of being told to drive into the sea by my in-car navigation system, and grudgingly had to go to TeleAtlas’ online store to purchase a new full cost CD. While I am in the middle of doing the online transaction and carefully reading their terms and conditions (by this stage you don’t think I trust them do you) I find section eight which says “Terms and conditions for subscriptions” for navigation CDs. Huh?!?

I ring them up and ask about this - as expected I get the now familiar “we don’t do upgrades”. “But it’s not an upgrade, it’s a subscription,” I say “and it’s in the terms and conditions on your website!!”. “One moment please” the customer services person says, then muffled conversations, then he comes back and then, wait for it, what do I hear…… “we don’t do subscriptions”.