I've been inspired

by this story on the bbc, to share with you a little anecdote of my day.

A week or two back, I started getting the nearly-at-your-car-insurance-renewal-date mail shots. Many of them I binned without reading. Fortunately, as I recycle stuff, I opened most of them to chuck away the envelopes separately, and thus discovered a letter from my insurance company about renewal – they’d changed their name and brand, so I hadn’t realised that it was actually important.

First off they warned me my renewal was due.

The second letter thanked me for my instructions to renew???

The third one threatened me with a £10 charge if I’d dared to change my debit card without informing them since last year!

Given that I hadn’t at any point given them instructions to renew, or permission to charge my debit card, I was slightly startled by this.

I spent most of the weekend in bed, so didn’t have the opportunity to tell them to sling their hook. They didn’t charge me yesterday as promised, so today I took Tim’s car and all the paperwork, and determined to ditch them and return to the AA. It took lots of telephone calls, holding and being transferred between departments before I managed to speak to someone at AQuote to tell them that speaking to my partner does not constitute instructions to renew my policy, I’d never given them permission, and I was going to be hugely unimpressed if they now tried to charge me to cancel.

Wisely, I feel, they didn’t. The AA, by contrast, quoted me lower via their website, and were on the phone to me within 10 minutes to arrange the policy. She then rang me back at hourly intervals until I’d managed to get shot of AQuote, and then took me through the whole policy again, made sure everything was right, and got me signed up back with them.

I’m sorry I ever left. Lesson learnt.