Monday, April 22, 2013

Welcome to the world of phone messages, phone calls not returned, phone trees and frustration…







There was a car crash… I was the lead car in a three car chain reaction…  Klinger (my jeep) was bumped hard, scratched and such, but came through with limited wounds…   The other two cars were not so lucky…  I am uninjured, but my neck hurts… This is what happens when two (or three) objects having mass try to occupy the same space at the same time…



But this is not a physics lesion… it is a lesson in bureaucracy, and business and phones…




One driver had Allstate Insurance (as I do) the other State Farm… (Research suggests that State Farm is a good or maybe even great insurance company… I have friends who work for them… I have some respect for them)  I haven’t filed a claim (as the first car in the chain, I am not at fault, the other guys are (even though car 2 was a girl) and one of them… guy, No 1, last in the chain,  is technically at fault, so He, and State Farm loses… 




So early today, car two’s insurance company (Car 2 being the meat in the sandwich, the middle car) calls and leaves a voice mail…  She (insurance lady) needs to talk to me about the accident… I return said call… leave a message…   then silence…  I try again before leaving for home… I don’t pick up phone calls on the road.. .but no phone calls came while on the road…  Pamela, Allstate’s claims agent can make calls, but so far hasn’t returned any… (note: I have Allstate Insurance, and have since 1973… Dad was an Allstate agent… money from Allstate put me through college… so this is not so much about Allstate (or State Farm) as about the 7 stages of hell which are all insurance claims systems… It is likely that Dante was inspired to write his epic (The Inferno) based on a minor traffic incident and the interchange with insurance companies that followed…))




So, late today, (well after 5:00) a State Farm representative calls… “what happened”   He will get back to me after a claim is filed… (I suspect a claim might have been filed… it is unlikely that State Farm calls and asks  a Allstate customer “what happened” without a claim being filed…  Alternately, I don’t understand the system)  

Allstate so far has not returned the call I made after they called me this morning…  (it’s that Hell thing… )




This morning, after the Allstate phone message, I took a few minutes to take a hard look at Klinger (Klinger is a Jeep… my Jeep… He/she was vehicle No.3 in the “incident”)  I took the spare tire off its mount… the tire had left a tire print on the hood of the blue Toyota which was vehicle No. 2 in the incident)…Klinger’s plastic bumper cover is scratched, maybe scarred, the “Warning, Don’t follow me, you won’t make it” bumper sticker torn…  (I also have been watching the news for information on the Boston bombing… so scratched can become scarred… it’s all news speak)…

I pulled the spare tire off… to check the carrier and door… to see anything which might be hidden behind…. With the tire off, I could see that the tire was pushed forward almost two inches leaving a print on the bumper, but the tire, tire carrier and back door on which the tire carrier is mounted seem un-damaged…The bumper is pushed in 1/8” in on the left side… I measured it… underneath the beast  (aka Klinger), you can see where at every place two parts come together, there has been movement…   So, something gave… I picked a ¼” square piece of Toyota blue paint off the trailer receiver… a bit of evidence… (but then, I have a collection of paint chips… and I know it was a blue car, specifically a Toyota, so maybe nothing new is proven…)




I put the tire back on…  I returned the Allstate phone call…   and now I wait… Take the State Farm phone call, and take Ibuprofen for my neck…  my neck hurts.  I doubt the process will do anything for my neck…

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