Colliding with rental insurance
posted in Miscellaneous |A few years back, OmegaDad rented a car while on a business trip (”The boys and I were playing poker in Nebraska City…”) (inside family joke). During this trip, he apparently scraped the bumper while parking. Our insurance covered it, but it was a small hassle, entailing various faxes back and forth and a letter or two from the rental company.
So this trip, when OD rented the car for the week, he signed on for the various insurance charges, hoping to avoid any further hassles.
Y’see, in his innocence, he thought the charge was a flat, one-time fee.
He mentioned that he had signed up for them with his one-day rental to get back to Phoenix on Tuesday, but didn’t say anything about the one-week-and-one-day rental…
Picture OmegaMom in the large super-rental facility in Phoenix.
First, take a moment to picture OmegaMom trying desperately to locate the car keys which had been in her hands mere moments previously…luckily, I discovered them buried in the dotter’s backpack, where I had hurriedly been tossing various dotterly accoutrements from the back seat. Har.
Then, picture OmegaMom glancing at the printout from the nifty hand-held car-rental gizmo from the patient and helpful rental car dude.
Picture OmegaMom’s jaw dropping and eyes popping when she reached the bottom line.
$737.18?!?!
Dear God in heaven. Surely there was a mistake?!
We sashayed up to the little “Customer Service” kiosk in the dark underground cavern.
The nice lady there said, “Well, this line is for this, and that line is for that, and this line here and that line there and that third line in this other place is for the insurance.”
I sat down this a.m. with the receipt and did some kackle-ating.
Note that some of these charges are taxable!
I was expecting to pay somewhere around $300…and, sure enough, after my kackle-ating, it turns out that, without the insurance damages (har!), the car would have cost $330.67. Or thereabouts.
In other words, more than $400 went to those “helpful” insurance coverages.
Gasp!
Rest assured that this will not happen again. I know that our insurance covers this stuff. The hassle of dealing with it ourselves, through our insurance company, is more than worth $400.
Holy moly. I am so glad that we have $$ in the bank and it’s not the disaster it would be if we had, say, been gallivanting to the southwest on a budget.
(Thanks to Scott for pointing out that it was Dylan Thomas, not John Donne, who penned “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”. I whapped myself on the forehead for that one.)
