‘Do you have any questions?’ said the man at the insurance company after an hour of me trying to take out a new car policy.
‘No. I wouldn’t know how to ask you a question about what has just gone on even if I wanted to,’ I replied, because insurance is now so complicated there is no way a person not employed in the underwriting industry can understand it.
And that would not matter, except we do need to get our heads around it, because we have to change it every year.
Insurance companies are good to you until they’re not, because insurance is like a toxic love affair. After a few years of one being nice to me, I got the inevitable punch in the face renewal quote and had to go on one of those price comparison websites they ought to call abused.com.
I found a policy, but entered the wrong start day, and when I tried to make it start a day earlier, the price unfathomably shot up.
So I rang this company and a nice man explained that if I started the policy on a Wednesday it would obviously be a lot more expensive than if it started on a Thursday. ‘It’s the algorithm,’ he explained. ‘Policies starting on certain days of the week are more expensive because it tells us something.’ Yeah, it tells you you’re in the right business, I wanted to say.
But I let it go because the process of trying to understand any of this was destroying good brain cells.
By the time I put the phone down, I was in no fit state to deal with a horse insurance policy that was automatically due to renew, according to a letter I had received, at £200 more a year for no apparent reason because I hadn’t made a claim, other than they just felt like metaphorically pushing me down the stairs.
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