So here’s a story for you. This has to do with a major U.S. insurer that we have a very long relationship with. We’ve had all of our cars with them since the early 1990s. That said, this has nothing at all to do with car insurance. It just shows how little big companies give a damn about their customers.

That’s not a big surprise.

So near the beginning of the year, our agent, who has been a long time family friend, gives us a call and says that his company is now going to start offering homeowner’s insurance in our area. We were already with the biggest  home owner’s insurance company in the country, but hey, if we can bring it all under one roof and maybe save a couple of bucks, why not? So we told him to put in the application and that should be that.

Except it wasn’t. Now it sure looks, from both my perspective and from the perspective of our agent, that said company really isn’t serious about covering houses out here. He has had tons of applications come back denied for absurd reasons. Ours was no different. Now keep in mind, this is early summer and they didn’t tell us that they were going to drive by the house, but it was fine that they did. They pointed out two problems. First, that in our back yard, one of the shrubs had grown up over the spring and was touching the side of the house. Not doing any damage, not causing any problems, touching. Well pal, it’s been 110 outside for weeks. I’m not  going to go out there and do yard work, sorry. If they had just asked, I would have walked out there and gone “snip snip snip” with a pair of hedge trimmers and that would have been it. But no, it got worse.

The second issue was that the spot where the street met the driveway, there were cracks there. Well guess what? That’s not our property! It’s not under our control! With the heat that we get out here in the summer, everything cracks. They completely repaved every single street in the city 4-5 years ago. You couldn’t tell now. There’s a wide crack running directly across the street right in front of the house. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. We’ve got a 6-8 foot zone all around the property which is owned by the city. It’s not under our control, nor would it even be covered by the policy. If they’re worried that someone is going to trip and fall, and I can’t imagine why that might be, but it would be the city getting sued, not us.

So we got this big long letter in the mail that said we’d been denied and we called our agent back and he said it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. He spent a week or two trying to fight it, I even went out and trimmed the shrub, but nope, they didn’t want to let it go. Even our agent said it made no sense, but he was  getting tons and  tons of rejections from our area because housing prices were high and they clearly didn’t want to take the risk, especially since, with the high winds, most people have to replace their roofs every couple of years. It’s why, the last time we did it, we got a hurricane-rated roof guaranteed for 20 years.

We just said whatever and went back to what we were doing before. After all, we’d never signed a contract, we’d never seen a policy and we’d never agreed to anything and our agent, he said we owed absolutely nothing.  They’d never done anything but driven by.

Months go by and sometime in the middle of October, I think, we get a letter from a collection agency demanding a couple of hundred bucks. Yeah, we don’t owe anything, sorry. So we called our agent and he said that shouldn’t have happened. Of course it shouldn’t, because not only had said company never even tried to collect, not only had  they never sent us a bill, they’d just sent it to a collection agency and that really constituted fraud. We never had a contract. We’d never agreed to pay them a thing.

So, he says he’ll take care of it. Another couple of weeks go by until we get a second letter in November. Back on the phone and he says he can’t figure out why this is happening. He’s been working from home for close to 2 years. His secretary says she hasn’t seen him face-to-face since February 2020.  Holy crap, get back to your office already! This is just stupid! But he promises that he’ll get it fixed again.

Fast forward to this morning when I get a call from the collection agency. I tell them we  don’t owe anything and to go back and check. Why this is such a problem, I don’t know, but the person on the phone is really rude and eventually I told her what to go do with herself and hung up. Then it was right back to my agent, who says that everything should have been fixed. The rider department should have already alerted the collection agency that it was a faulty charge. Granted, that didn’t explain why they had never even tried to bill us, that’s another thing our agent can’t explain. If I ever hear from them again, I’m supposed to give them his personal cell phone number and he’ll set them straight. He just texted me pictures of all of the close-out paperwork. I hope it helps. Why it took a month and a half, I have no clue, but what  can you do?

Yeah. Now I don’t think I can really blame my agent. Like I said, he’s a personal family friend. In fact, he’s my father-in-law’s best  friend from childhood. I don’t think he’s going to screw us over. It’s just the gigantic insurance mechanism that he works for that doesn’t care. This will just disappear. It will never show up on our credit report, hopefully, since it’s spotless. They’ll just pretend it never happened. We’ll never get an apology. They’ll never acknowledge their mistakes. It’s just one more place that they screwed up and don’t have to take any responsibility for.

I’m seeing this more and more in the modern world though. Big companies don’t give a damn. The consumer just doesn’t matter. There’s always someone else to fill the void and let’s be honest, where can you go that’s better? All of them are just as bad.

Isn’t it time for the consumer to start getting upset at this? I don’t mean one or two, I mean by the millions because it happens every single day. Yet we’ve allowed our government to force us to be insured. It’s a good idea, granted, but you can’t just opt out. That just allows the insurance companies to hold us hostage. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about cars or your health, you have to pay up whether you want to or not and they don’t have to care because you’re a captive audience.

Can’t we stop playing these idiotic games? Well, we probably could if most of society wasn’t a bunch of brainless idiots. This is yet another place where being surrounded by gullible sheep isn’t doing us any good.

Kind of sad, right?