blogging it real

A few months ago I bought a 'new' car. At least it was new to me, though with 100,000 kms on the clock it was not new to the roads.

Anyway, I went and got it insured with an insurance company which shall remain nameless, nah fuck it, AMI. Well they were all very nice and all but told me that this car which I bought for 3,750 would cost about 1050 bucks to fully insure for one year. Now I already have house insurance with them and am over 25 quite comfortably and have never caused an accident or done anything dodgy in a vehicle in my life. Hell, I've never even shagged in one (unless campervans count? Oh I suppose they do).

Where was I? Hang on it's dinner time, I'll be back later...

(OK so that was only a few dots to your eyes but it represents about half an hour in my time).

Well... OK I've worked out what I wanted to say. It was going to cost me the price of the car every three years to insure. Now I know we should never assume everthing is going to go swimmingly and that we aren't going to take that corner a bit too fast on that drizzly winter evening but hell, if I manage to write a car off, or at least smack it up pretty good every three years for the rest of my life then I probably won't have much of a life. And yet that's kind of what the insurance company is saying they expect of me. OK that's not true. They expect and hope I'll only be writing cars off every 5+ years so they can pocket a few grand every time between but you get what I mean.

So I said, fuck that. I'll just take the 3rd party insurance for the time being thanks and wait until either a) I have a lot more money or b) hell freezes over after I career off a cliff in the Waitakere's and end up there.

So 3rd party insurance was a few hundred bucks annually which was a bit closer in line with my budget.

A few days later my financial advisor thought that was "disgraceful" and began investigations. My mum, sorry, I mean my financial advisor then called around for some better prices and low and behold found that NZI will insure the exact same car for the exact same value without giving a stuff about my wife with no NZ license for about a little over 500 bucks. AND I have no house insurance with NZI which apparently gets me a reduced rate with AMI by doubling up!

So where the fuck is the extra 500 bucks that AMI is taking going? Perhaps they actually pay out on claims or something? Perhaps NZI drivers have half as many accidents?

Fucked if I know but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out who I'm now insured with.

So I join over the phone and get the policy in the mail. Was very interested to see a hundred and fifty bucks had been taken out of my credit card account without being informed that that would happen. Turns out that the policy had had the quote date of two months ago incorrectly entered as the start date of the policy despite the fact that it was a quote only and that I was already insured with somebody else. A quick phone call and thats all sorted but you have to wonder how badly people who can't 'defend' themselves (recent immigrants, the busy, or the relatively uneducated for starters) get ripped off each year by these big companies who make errors in their favour with gay abandon but never the other way round.

On a different topic. I've seen the amateur footage of the O'Driscoll 'spear tackle' and in my opinion if anything it makes things look better for Umaga and Mealamu. At first it looked dodgy but as they replayed it a couple more times I looked more closely and Mealamu was basically falling/lying over the ruck and in no real position to exert much force or control the tackle. And Umaga appeared to drop O'Driscoll rather than do any sort of driving motion which is quite common to see in spear tackles. It was a drop with O'Driscoll clearly showing gross inexperience as to what to do when being dropped on his head. Clearly mothers in Ireland shelter their babies far too much.

Umaga should have got a couple of weeks no doubt about it for putting a player in a dangerous position and then not making enough of an effort to protect him or check that he was OK when it happened or even afterwards. But I think the Vagana/Pritchard one in the first league test was much worse and they got off scot free because whatshisface wasn't seriously injured and because they 'blackmailed' the Kangaroo court because Scott Prince had done a similar tackle in the curtainraiser and was not even cited over it.

Which is what I am.

Over it.