My partner and I are moving at the end of August. Negotiating our way through the potential minefield of lawyers, bankers, movers, real estate agents and other assorted characters can be a challenge but the whole process has been fairly smooth sailing so far. Except for the dreaded Lilian.
I’ve never met Lilian, maybe I won’t have to. I hope not. She is not coming to our house warming. She is not on my Christmas card list. Lilian is the public face of a local branch of a large insurance company. It all started out well enough. She spoke to my partner and took down all the details of our house. Then she went on holiday for a week and said she would deal with us when she returned.
I picked up the trail and phoned her when she got back from vacation. She had lost all the details we had previously given her. “Sorry about that, I hope you’re not inconvenienced.” Back to square one. I went through the list and made sure she was brought up to date again.
Lilian is one of those people who can only work at one pace. Instead of going through the application form and determining what is outstanding, and providing you with a list of questions, she asks for each piece of information separately, each constituting a different telephone call or e-mail. She’s really slow to return calls or e-mails; she always has some excuse about being busy with another client or that her colleague is sick. So what should have taken a couple of days at the outside to sort out, has taken upwards of three weeks.
Late breaking request, just one more piece of information, she said. “When were the heating, plumbing and electrical systems last upgraded?” Oh drat. I contacted the vendors via my realtor to their realtor. It took me half a day to get the details. When I finally got the answer, it turned out that Lilian had already spoken to the vendor’s agent the previous week and he had told her the exact same information. If you’ve seen the movie “Finding Nemo”, our Lilian is certainly channelling Dorie, the fish with no short term memory.
We’re moving at the end of this week Have we insurance yet? Well almost. Yesterday after answering a revolving door of questions, the dreaded Lilian said she was ready to fax over the completed application form for my signature. I fainted clean away in shock, but I told her to go ahead. Half an hour later the call came to say she couldn’t fax to my machine. I checked the machine and it was fine. I sent a test fax to the machine. It was fine. She tried again three times, no luck.
Meanwhile I had been sent excellent recommendations of two other insurance agents and their names were blazing on the page in front of me. Here I was, trying to get Lilian to use basic office equipment. I gave her my partner’s fax number. She called back to say that his machine wasn’t working either. I politely indicated that her machine might be the source of the difficulty, if you please, petal. She rang back to say she was going down the street to use another business’s fax machine. Well at least that was showing initiative. She called back to say the fax to my partner went fine.
My other half rang me and asked if we could throw the dice and whoever lost, had to deal with Lilian to complete the insurance. Muggins here got the short straw so BelovedPartner (memo to self: Partner = Doghouse) faxed me the application form. I signed it and faxed it off to Dreaded V. It went through like a shot. I called (twice) to ask Lilian to confirm that she has received it. No response. Now I knew for sure she had to be hiding under the desk.
Lilian called back four hours later after I have left work and left a message to report that all was sorted and that we had insurance, but could I come in and make arrangements to pay? Oh horror, I don’t think I can meet her, without attacking her. Calm down. I phoned her up this morning and paid by credit card and I hope to high heaven that we’re actually covered.
You may be wondering why we’d stuck with her and not gone elsewhere. Well we got a hefty discount in the first year because of our mortgage arrangements so it seemed like a good idea. I thought that having invested so much time trying to get the insurance policy sorted out, we thought we should finish the job with her. Very bad logic. We’re never doing that again. Next time we’ll cut our losses and move on.
You can be sure that come 28th August 2004 we will have switched our insurance to another company. I’m in deep therapy. I can’t deal with the Dreaded L any more. The kindly folks in the uniforms and the padded van are arriving any minute now
