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Updating the maps for the car& #39;s satnav. I think if @BMW had tasked me with "come up with a more slow, painful and baroque process than the one we devised to do this thing" I would be hard pressed to deliver.
Firstly, I have to install their download manager to download the file. Not, say, simply click on a link and download the map data keyed in some way to my VIN...
Then I need to get a USB stick to put it on. The file is 18G, so that& #39;s all of the lying-around-the-office USB sticks out. Once I find a suitably large stick, it must be formatted FAT32 or NTFS. Not ExFAT, which 99% of USB sticks >8G will be already.
After providing the necessarily formatted USB stick, the aforementioned Download Manager proceeds to unzip the mapdata directly onto the USB. The medium well known for its sterling random access write speed.
[ There will now be a prolonged interval whilst this crap bit of @BMW software extracts the file, probably using redirected getchar() and putchar() in a for loop ]
Update: The extract failed at 50%. So I& #39;ve pottered off to find another USB stick (lets give it the benefit of the doubt). It transpires that the high quality "download manager" lies through its silicon teeth - an ExFAT formatted USB drive is perfectly acceptable.
Extract finally complete, some 45 minutes later. But wait, this process is the gift that keeps giving. I have been shown a secret unlock *20 character* random string (complete with 1IL0O ambiguity) to enter *IN THE CAR* using the twiddly knob to choose characters.
Said code cannot be copied either, so I can& #39;t print it out in courier to resolve the character ambiguity. Seriously, @BMW this heap of junk update process actually made it past quality control?!
Things may now be going (slowly) in the right direction.
Shortly after taking that photo, the progress bar vanished. I had no idea that it was still going - although I left the ignition on and a door open just in case to stop the whole thing powering down. I was rewarded about half an hour later with a message saying it had updated.
You want the cherry on the icing of this stale, hard cake? There were a few new-ish local roads in particular that my 5 year old map didn& #39;t have - finally prompting me to update. You& #39;ve guessed it: They still aren& #39;t there. 
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