Another Cheque!!

Having been exasperated by the insurance Co.s penny pinching attitude I gave them "some valued customer feedback" in an e-mail that may well have exploded if not handled with care & I also forwarded the same to the Broker for information. I say Broker with a capital as this particular one is worthy of considerable respect. My previous experience of insurance brokers is that they are not only entirely useless, but also lower-than-a-snake's-bollo belly. However Barry at "Frank Pickles" deserves nothing but praise & has sorted out any problems I've had with efficiency & good humour. Sure enough a cheque for the princely sum of £26 floated lightly onto my mat within two days of me writing the e-mail. I know it seems a bit mean, being only £26, but I was very miffed that by prudent purchasing I'd saved them £500, but £26 had to be shaved off the labour charge because that's what a guy who saw the car in a damaged state for about ten minutes said.

Anyway, might be blatting again this weekend - hoorah

A Cheque!

The on-going saga of the insurance claim might be entering it's closing phase.

Having been working away for some weeks, it was difficult to get the necessary paperwork together, but eventually it was all sent in & guess what - a cheque arrived! To be fair, Equity did send me a cheque for the recovery immediately after my last outburst, so this was the cheque for the repairs. Hurrah.

On the other hand, from a customer service point of view it’s still not an entirely rosy picture.

Way back, an insurance assessor saw the car, took my estimate, then for some reason fabricated something entirely different & gave authority to proceed with the repair. His estimate was way over what I’d asked for with regard to parts & he’d included a figure of £224 for labour. The total payout by his estimate would be around £2000.

Before paying out for the repair, the insurance Co. wanted an invoice including receipts for the parts, so I sent all that off showing the much lower cost of parts & asking for a nominal £250 for the labour – probably only because I couldn’t remember the actual figure.

The total repair value stood at around £1500, so a £500 saving over the assessor’s estimate.

Yesterday I received a cheque for the parts - & £224 for the labour as that’s what the assessor had said. The princely sum of £26 less than I’d asked for - 10/10 for saving the Co. money, but minus several thousand for irritating the customer.

Last night I sent an e-mail detailing the time taken for every stage of the repair, & pointing out that I’m a mechanical engineer by trade & my employer charges £70/hr for my time, so the labour bill should have been £2030 - & that would amount to a 20% saving as I’m not VAT registered. Even using a more normal motor trade rate of £50/hr, the bill would have been £1450.

 So would they please pay my very reasonable request of £250 (£8.62/hr).

Of course the real irony is that it will cost Equity more than the £26 saving to have someone read my e-mail (it was deliberately quite long) & write a cheque.

 

Let's see what happens.

Back On The Road

With the situation at work not improving (I'm owed £2,500 in unpaid expenses & overtime) I decided to take a week off. This was not as productive a time as I'd hoped as there was a lot of family stuff going on. But, by the end of the week I'd finished the rear valance, fitted the headlamp trim rings & aero covers & as a finale I smeared some goopy stuff called "wunderseal" to the inside of the front wings to stop stones thrown up by the wheels cracking the bonnet.

As a reward for all this effort I went out on a car run on Sunday.It was a bit of a trek over to Kent, but it's a long time since I did a car run so well worth it. There was a P.A.M. (Puckered Ar5e Moment) when two of us were barrelling merrily along a country lane with the sun in our faces, about to plunge into a dark "tree tunnel" when an ENORMOUS tractor emerged unlit from the gloom. There was much standing on brakes & no harm was done. A little extra laundry perhaps, but no actual harm.