Before Wayne and Waynetta Slob pretended I had run into the back of their car, my annual insurance premium was £372.
Now that Mr and Mrs Slob’s ludicrously spurious claim for ‘soft tissue damage’ is well under way, can you guess what my renewal premium is?
I’ll give you a clue. I rang Aviva to try to get them to explain the thinking behind the new figure.
I spoke to a nice guy, let’s call him Steve, who went to great lengths to try to explain the increase.
OK, so he didn’t go to great lengths until I threatened to commit suicide. Until I threatened to commit suicide, he said the new premium had been ‘generated by the computer’ and it was not for him, nor any other human being on this planet or indeed on any other planet, to try to explain it.
His exact words were, ‘We don’t manually calculate it. Our computer generates it. It is all done behind the scenes.’ Spooky. When I asked if there was a human being who had at some stage operated the computer as it was making its calculations, he said: ‘There will have been, yes.’ When I asked if I could therefore speak to that person about its mysterious imaginings, he said, and I quote, ‘No one will be able to tell you anything.’
So I told him that if he didn’t tell me something I was going to get a big, sharp knife and slash a main artery while I was on the phone to him.
Perhaps, Steve said, he might be able to explain how the computer had generated the new figure after all.
I always knew I was going to lose part of my no claims bonus. But it turns out that my insurability has been damaged beyond recognition by the nature of the claim the Slobs have made.
The injuries they are detailing are so horrendous that I am now judged a bigger liability than a teenage joyrider called Jaden in a souped-up Ford Escort.
It is alleged that the Slobs are in poor shape since my car nearly hit them at 3mph in a traffic queue on Streatham High Road.
The Slobs were in poor shape before they started to pretend that I had crippled them by shunting silently into their bumper.
When they leapt out of their brand new Ford Galaxy to start howling about their backs, it was perfectly evident they were the kind of people who had never eaten a healthy meal in their lives, nor taken a minute’s exercise, nor done any kind of basic maintenance on themselves, such as visiting a hairdresser or dentist. Mrs Slob had more teeth missing than she had intact. Her skin had that greenish hue that comes from years of diligent Benson & Hedges consumption. She was, not to put too fine a point on it, the sort of person who prompts you to have an epiphany when you think, ‘Oh, that’s why McCain has brought out ready-made baked potatoes!’ Because until you meet someone like her you cannot imagine how there could possibly be a market for anything so feckless-specific as a ready-baked baked potato which one heats up in the microwave.
She screamed long and hard, whilst jumping up and down, about how much her lower back hurt, and how this was evidence of whiplash. She expleted lavishly in a dialect I assumed was advanced benefit claimant speak.
She screeched, virtually without resort to a single defining consonant, about how ‘me ’usban’s spine’s screwed togevva so naaaa ee’ll be to’ally incapaci’a’ed, wunnee?’
You may remember there wasn’t a scratch on their car and I have mobile phone pictures to prove it. I also have a policeman who witnessed that no accident took place.
But that has not, for some reason, enabled the insurance company to fight them off. The claim is proceeding apace. This is curious.
If I were an insurance company disputing a faked injury claim by two consumers of ready-made baked potatoes and I was offered a photograph of an unblemished vehicle and a police witness to swear no crash happened I would be pretty darned confident. So why is Aviva doubtful?
I’ve racked my brains and all I can deduce is this: if Aviva loses, the claim will cost several thousand pounds in a one-off payment. But my renewal premium, in case you haven’t guessed, is £1,136. That’s for this year, and possibly years to come.
If they win, they don’t pay the Slobs. But they only get £372 from me, possibly falling to even less in subsequent years.
It puts me in mind of that line of Leo Bloom’s from The Producers: ‘Under the right circumstances, a producer could actually make more money with a flop than a hit.’
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