So a bit of follow up to my car “incident“. You’d think that going into the insurance company to be looked after when a truck, driven by a driver who was known to be negligible (as the police officer saw that he ignored the flashing “you’re too tall” lights), hit a bridge and sprayed your car with debris causing damage to it. Well you’d think “there’s no way that I can’t come out on top here”.
I even jokingly set my Facebook status to “Going into ICBC. These guys will take care of me, right?” pretending that there was some way that I could get screwed over when in this case you know, just know that you can’t possibly be in the wrong.
Sadly when dealing with ICBC this isn’t the case. I guess I’m not technically “in the wrong”, but turns out that the truck was registered in Alberta. Which means that the insurance company (ICBC for anyone not the 3 people other than my mother who reads this), can’t just talk internally to itself but instead they have to go out and find the private insurer that the trucker used, negotiate with them, if he has insurance, hope that they don’t push back, and blah blah blah. In the end this means that I pay my insurance deductible and they probably can get it back for me, but I’m still out the cold hard cash until they can talk to the Alberta insurer.
It all sounds reasonable when you’re in the office talking to the adjuster of course, with lots of nodding and smiling and then when I got out I thought to myself “wait a minute, did I just get screwed over here?” I figured no, not totally. Yes, I’m out money but my faith in the goodness of people (* cough *) says that they will be able to find the insurer and there won’t be a fight and I will get my deductible back.
Then I started hunting for a place to repair the car and that showed more issues. See when the form says that you pay the deductible, you are in a different class of people when you talk to the insurance company. Yes, they know it’s not your fault, but because of the way things are structured it’s almost as if you were at fault, because I guess their deal with being paid from ICBC is different.
To quote a friend, “icky bicky” (ICBC).
I did find a place that would take it in this week (or so I was told) and could get me a courtesy car, and wouldn’t write my car off (though he did ask me if I wanted it written off or not). Fingers crossed to get a call from them tomorrow telling me that they have a car and to bring my beast in.
Unsurprisingly a search of this blog doesn’t hold a single good mention of ICBC back to 1997. I can’t imagine why.