BEYOND WINTER: The
Irrelevant Nos of An Old Curmudgeon—
Every once in a while, I like to search online for auto insurance. I’m not about to change companies. It’s too complicated and time-consuming. They all use the same algorithms anyway. But I have ulterior motives. [Actually, I don’t have to search online. If I just think about car insurance, I begin to get offers…]
We pay a dollar a mile for insurance, because we drive no farther than the mailbox. That doesn’t matter to the insurance companies. They only want to know how old you are and how old your car is, not how many miles you drive. And what your email address is…
That’s where I get my gleeful revenge. Once you have looked online for car insurance, it’s like an email tsunami. Even people who don’t do car insurance want to give you a quote. Companies with names like Flybynight are as interested as State Farm. Every day in my in-box, I get six or eight offers of insurance, each assuring me that theirs is better than any of the others.
And, one by one, I click on those little boxes to delete them. No, I don’t use the box at the top, where one click obviates all such emails at the same time. I want to click on every one of them, individually. There is such joy in that!
Yes, I know that nobody at those companies knows, because it’s all robotic, but that’s not the point. I’m not trying to get any insurance company execs fired [since I don’t know how]. I do this for my satisfaction and enjoyment.
The aging-well people say that it is important as we age to stay socially engaged. What better social engagement could there be than rejecting car insurance offers?
Well, it would be fun to reject life insurance companies, too, but life insurance companies don’t want to sell to old people, anyway. I got a cold call from one of those companies. I let the woman talk, anticipating the enjoyment of telling her I didn’t want any. She told me what a wonderful plan they had for me and didn’t it sound grand. I allowed as how it did. She asked how old I was. When I told her, she hung up. I mean, didn’t say a thing. Just a solitary click. That just wasn’t fair. I’m supposed to be the one who gets to do that.
Health insurance companies don’t want to sell to old people, either. So I can’t reject their offers. But car insurance is fair game for rejection.
I don’t mean those car repair plans, the ones that keep saying they are about to run out, even though you didn’t even know you had them, and want you to reup right now. They aren’t interested in selling to people who really need them. Our friend, Joan Newsome, got tired of their calls and said “Sure, I’ll buy.” When they found out how many miles she had on her car, they hung up.
I’m not against insurance. It’s necessary and useful. But I figure at the price we pay, I should get the enjoyment of saying “No” once in a while.
John Robert McFarland
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