I Hate Insurance Companies

Ok, I have a confession to make. I am far from a stellar driver. I have miraculously escaped many a accident on slippery icy roads in the past by merely pure unadulterated luck.

I also happen to own a lead foot.

In other words, I have had my fair share of speeding tickets, one of the more recent ones was just under two years ago while driving through the previously autobahn like Montana with its newly enforced speed limits. It caught me by surprise. I had done so well to clear my record that I was six months from a completely free driving record and I nabbed two speeding tickets within two weeks of each other. These things like to come in pairs to ruin your life.

Well, one of the upsides of being in Kosovo for a year is that no matter what happens, what happens in Kosovo stays in Kosovo and doesn't show up on your driving record. And fortunately this includes two minor accidents involving a HMMW-V. My record is clean of that, it happened in a foreign country.

Unfortunately, I did happen to get into an accident in January of 2004 as well. An accident I was not at fault for but still has managed to show up on my drivig record. Grr I hate that. Now i have to prove to my insurance company that it wasn't my fault and the other guy had to pay me for the damage. Unfortunately, if you've read my blog recently, you would know that right now my life is in disorder and I can't find anything, including former accident information.

Ergo more ranting of a policy that makes some sense but is still rather annoying

And then there is the discriminatory discount. I wonder if I could fight this? See, insurance companies offer a discount to their customers if the customers have been insured over a period of time without a break in their insurance. Ok, fine, offer a discount to people for maintaining their insurance, but what about poor souls like me who really find it a bloody waste of time to keep insurance on a car they no longer have when they are out of the country for the last year or so? People like Military? This discount is a slap in the face, how can I maintain a discount without paying the liability insurance of $70 bucks a month? What the hell is that? What is the freakin' point? But her answer, 'well, in six months time you'll get it back'. So? How do you deal with a discount you aren't allowed to have because though you had it before deploying overseas with the US military, you decided to forego the insurance when you got rid of the car because it was a freakin' waste of money. I'm single, I have no reason to keep a car on its last leg insured, there is no point in me being insured. But because of my break in keeping up with my insurance, I am no longer eligeble for this discount.

And here I am, serving my country in a (*cough cough*) war zone and I can't be waived for not having insurance because of it. Ok, I'm annoyed, for a variety of reasons, and they all compounded on each other.

Plus, well, this girl just grated on my nerves and made me want to slap her. What the hell, chica? You know the type, the overly nice ones who refuse to help you?

I don't like my current insurance. I think I'm going to try changing it this week.

And when did insurance get so freakin' expensive? Why is owning a car such a necessity these days? I learned that horrible lesson of why a car is important for keeping one's sanity while I was spending a pointless eleven days demobilizing in Fort Lewis. But now that I have a car, I really found I don't like driving it anywhere. Driving's a pain in the fourth.

That is one lesson we can take from the Europeans. They got great public transportation. Our public Trans is severely lacking. All we got is a bus system on its last leg (though a few years ago I learned a valuable lesson in the importance of having a working public transportation system when I lost my car for a few months. That was hell on earth right there). I had a rant there to. However, the US isn't set up to have a Public Transport system like Europe does because of how spaced everything is, especially here in the west. I did take a subway in Boston, that was valuable to have, wouldn't have gotten anywhere without it. Big cities, Public Tran (is there another name for this?) is important. In smaller cities, its still important but harder to justify. Curses.

Fortunately I've got a radio. I spent about five minutes at a stoplight tonight listening to the radio and thinking about life in general without realizing that I hadn't pulled up into the stoplights' sensors and it would therefore stay perpetually red. It took somebody else to pull along beside me before I snapped to my senses and realized that I was daydreaming (in the middle of the night, but still).

Find the not at fault thing for the insurance this week. Another thing to add to my growing doomsday list of things to do.

This is an example of a rambling done at one in the morning. It loses all train of thought by the end of the rant.