Pain one

It is the time of year when our car insurance come due.

It so happens that we had been with company A for some years and had been entirely happy with them. Their rates had only climbed in a very modest way from year to year and we had not felt the urge to go in for all this shopping around nonsense. Not like our building society at all.

But this year, I was all set to renew again when I declared a minor speeding offence. This resulted in much palaver, much listening to canned music at call centres, much poking around in dusty records. And me getting steadily more irritated. The call centre then told me that they proposed to increase our renewal premium by more than the £100 fine I paid last year. Huffed and puffed a bit and then put the phone down. Really irritated now. Got better things to do with my time than go through this nonsense every year.

After a little while I cool down enough to phone company B whom I had heard about from my pension provider. Company B does not seem to be terribly interested in my speeding fine and proposed charging me pretty much the same as I paid company A last year. The deal is now done.

Peering at all the paperwork, I associated to the story that the drill in Russia these days is to have so much small print, so many petty fogging rules and regulations, that it is more or less impossible to comply with all of them. Which does not usually matter, but does mean that if the authorities ever want to bust you, perhaps because you have said something unpleasant about them on Twitter, they can always find something for which they can charge you, convict you and bang you up. With physical abuse being an optional extra.

PS: pain two is going through the same performance with our house insurance, prone to climb in a very immodest way from year to year, despite our not having claimed anything for many years now. A pleasure to come.