A story: Three companies and our claim

Dear Person Who Monitors This Email Inbox,

I am writing to you inform you that, once our policy has expired with you, we will no longer remain a customer of yours. I’m sure this will not necessarily be earth shatteringly interesting news to you, but I thought it might help to let you know why. It’s nothing personal.

We made a claim with you earlier this month for some damage made to an iPad we own.

Since this happened, I’ve spoken to TWO entirely different companies, both of whom who seem to suggest they handle claims for you. This was a surprise to me.

The first company, dubbed “The Claims Unit”, told me they needed to pass our details to their Underwriting Team.

The Underwriting Team needed to check if we’d declared any other claims we’d ever made about anything, anywhere. This process was so complicated and intricate that it was impossible to offer any form of estimate upon its completion. Similar, perhaps, to the sequencing of the human genome, or untangling Christmas Lights on Christmas Eve when you’ve forgotten to buy the Turkey.

I mean, it’s not as if this information is just *available* anywhere, is it?…

I can only assume that there was some kind of sinister error when sharing this information. Maybe you used a bad batch of USB thumb drives, or there was a nasty accident involving a large magnet, some paperclips and an intern called Brian.

I was expecting that our claim would be stuck in some kind of Time Vortex. Endlessly spinning about whilst your Underwriting Team searched valiantly for the information (which is above, by the way). Generations of Underwriters would pass this story along. It would become legend. Maybe there would even be a film about the crusade for our claim information (which is above, by the way) starring Tom Hanks.

But NO!

Excitement!

Today saw a letter, and a delightful phone call, from a company called ‘Be! Valued’

I can’t comment on the branding approach desired by choosing such a company such a name. It wouldn’t be fair to. However, I am very impressed by the sheer quantity of ampersands used in our letter, and the jaunty angle of the exclamation mark:

Lovely stuff that.

I’m excited to see if there are going to be any more companies joining our little party? Perhaps there is an underwriting firm called called 'Our Risk, Our Decision’ or a loss adjusters called 'Your? Guess! (Incorporating: Is As Good As Mine)’?

Anyway, the delightful folk at Be! Valued are sending a special little box for our iPad to be whisked off and repaired tomorrow, which I can only assume will be inspected by 27 different businesses and after 6 years, finally actually repaired.

I’m hoping that once we’ve potentially managed to sort our silly little claim we can still be friends.

All our love

Mr & Ms. S & O Watts & Coulson.

xxxx