So I missed several hours of work yesterday morning while I took care of business and filed an insurance claim on my car. The insurance company naturally wanted to send me to their affiliated vendor to do the repair work, but I wanted to talk it over with my dad first — he’s a mechanic and an old-school car guy who knows lots of other car guys, and I wanted his recommendation before I made an irrevocable decision — so the telephone drone who took my claim put things on hold until I made up my mind. I was given a callback number for “the claim office that would complete the process” (presumably a different call center from the one that opened the claim, or at least a different floor in the same building; seems rather inefficient to me, but what do I know of modern corporate labyrinths?).

I took the car to see a guy, got a quote, then, with the clock pushing noon and the certainty that my inbox at the office was buckling under the strain, headed for work. I got busy and didn’t get around to calling my insurance company back, which was probably foolish procrastination on my part, but that’s how it happened and I won’t apologize for it.

This morning, I tried calling that claim-office number first thing, figuring I could maybe fax them my bid or something and have everything wrapped up in short order. Silly me…

First, it took repeated tries over the space of several hours to even get through to the claim office. Then, the phone drone who was completing the claim informed me that, bid or no bid, I have to go to their preferred vendor anyhow so an official representative can look at the top with his own eyes and confirm that, yep, it’s slashed clean through. I guess I understand the need for that, but couldn’t the first guy I talked to, the one who opened the claim, have told me that to begin with? Especially when I kept asking him, “so what’s the procedure here?”

I hate to sound so frickin’ naive about this stuff, but I’ve never had to make an insurance claim before, and neither the parents nor The Girlfriend have done it in years, and then not with this company, so I don’t have any way of knowing what the procedure is. And it’s not that I particularly mind having a little extra time to sleep in tomorrow morning or having a couple of free hours outside the office — indeed, the way things have been at work lately, what with all the talk about install scripts and such, it’s a welcome break. But it really gripes me that the phone drones don’t provide you with complete information right up front, especially when you directly ask for it. It’s all about getting you to stay within their cozy little network, and if you say you want to go to an independent repair shop, suddenly they stop being helpful. Seriously, the dude’s whole attitude and tone of voice just changed. Like I was suddenly a deadbeat who owed him back rent or something.

And it gripes me as well that it took me so damn long to get through to the claim office, too. It took several tries to even get their system to accept the call, and then I was stuck on hold for about a half hour. I’ve never understood why, if there’s so much demand for telephone services, these places don’t hire a dozen or fifty or a hundred more representatives to handle the volume, instead of torturing people with those damned “your call is important to us” recordings. Obviously my call is not all that important, or you’d be making sure someone is available to answer it!

(That’s not as bad as when I tried to file the police report over the weekend, though; a slashed ragtop doesn’t qualify as an emergency, so I was referred to Dispatch instead of 911. The number for Dispatch was busy for basically twelve hours, all through Saturday. If there’s that much demand for the police — the police, mind you, not just some business somewhere — on the weekend, why don’t they have more phone lines, more operators, more whatever it takes? What if I’d had a real problem instead of just a couple of holes in my roof? What a ridiculous state of affairs…)

Finally, I have a nagging dread that the insurance company is going to somehow screw me over on the claim, too, either by not covering the full cost of replacing my ragtop or by jacking my premiums or something. God, as if I wasn’t still angry enough at the prick who did the slashing to begin with, now I have all the stress of dealing with this crap…