Car Insurance - Turning Tuscan: A Step-by-Step Guide to Going Native - page 133

you wait, the music is paused abruptly every 20 seconds. You stop what you're doing and
think that your moment of deliverance has come. But, after the brief pause, a voice informs
you that your patience is highly appreciated, an operator will be with you as soon as pos-
sible, your call will be answered in the order received, etc. Try as you might to ignore that
pause, it gets your attention every time. In the ten to fifteen minutes that you might wait
for an operator, you get distracted from your work and hear the same announcement thirty
or forty times. Then, finally, the moment of glory: the music stops and a real live operator
announces his or her presence.
IexplainthatIwanttoswitchmyinsurance frommycurrentvehicle tothenewcarthatI'm
buying. The operator begins preparing an estimate for me. After re-entering from scratch
all my personal information—none of which has changed—he asks me various questions
about the new vehicle: What is the engine displacement as expressed in cubic centimeters?
What is the vehicle's net weight? What's the length of the drive shaft? What is the kilowatt
rating? Is it for private or promiscuous use?
The answers to these questions are all codified on a master document called the “ libretto ”
which is a sort of birth certificate for your vehicle. It has all the minutiae of factory spe-
cifications that the insurance company feeds into their computer to scientifically calculate
your rate based on their advanced probability algorithms. After about twenty minutes of
this,theoperator tells methat hewill beemailing meanestimate tofill out,sign,andreturn
to them.
The estimate arrives the following day along with a list of additional documents that I need
to provide to complete the transaction. I'm now familiar with most of the corporate and
commercial documents, have my copies already in hand, scan the lot and send it all back to
Dialogo.
The next day an email arrives that says: “There appears to be an anomaly in your applic-
ation. Please call customer service.” So, it's time for another round of music, pauses, and
announcements.
Needless to say, there's no way ever to speak to the same operator twice. So, we go through
the identification ritual, I provide my name, rank, tax ID and all the rest, and the new oper-
ator begins looking into my anomaly.
“Apparently it says on the libretto that the car is for promiscuous use but the dealer's mani-
fest says that it's for private use. Which is it?”