process server comes he doesn't park in front of your house. These are
strategies intentional by there design to catch you off guard and unaware.
Strategies designed to give them the emotional upper hand over the surprised
and unsuspecting.
These people do these jobs every day yet, you are new to the game, aren't you?
Several years back a woman talking on a cell phone while driving didn't see the traffic
stop and rear ended my car at fifty miles per hour. A few days later when I called her
insurance company the adjuster said glibly, "oh yes, I'm looking at the accident report
it says here that you were involved in a pile up."
I stopped him, "No, I wasn't involved in a pile up, I was rear ended by your customer."
"Our investigator has yet to make that determination," he answered.
"Sir, the police aren't the courts."
We had the car towed to my in-laws because they had storage space for the totaled car. First, the insurance company offered us $700 for a car that we'd paid $5,000 for and that was before we put a new convertible top on it.
"We're not going to pay you for the new top or the new tires," they explained, "anymore than we'd pay you for the gas in the tank."
Then the phone calls began, wanting to know when they could pick up the wrecked car. "That would be sometime after you pay us a fair price for it, I answered. They would call the house once a day and call my wife's cell phone twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Three phone calls a day for six weeks all wanting to know when they could pick up the car.
"State law says the injured party shall be provided with rental transportation." The
insurance company said, "Go ahead, rent a car and if we're found liable we'll reimburse you."
"That's not what the laws says, I'm the injured party. I didn't hit your customer your customer hit me!"
He calmly answered, "We dispute liability."
While they were in an incredible hurry to pick up my wrecked car they weren't in any hurry to do much of anything else. They knew well that we needed our car replaced and they knew well that by making us pay for a rental car on a credit card they were putting financial pressure on us to settle quickly.
The evidence of my innocence and her guilt was the car itself. I was hit so hard it broke the drivers seat off the floorboard and broke the bottom cushion of the back seat off of it's
mount. Their strategy was to get the car quick before we thought to take pictures. Once the car was in their possession we would be under even more pressure to accept their paltry offers and their phone calls were designed to harass us. Their phone calls were to make sure that
settlement was always the issue of the day and never to give us a day off.
I tell this story as an example of how the world works. We were confused and disoriented in uncharted waters, I was on serious pain killers for several weeks. We were under personal stress, emotional stress and financial stress. The insurance company knew all of these things and used them all to their best advantage. More than once the insurance company called me saying, "Your wife said to call you and ask you about the best time to pick up the car." Then they called her with the same story only reversed.
From the very beginning of the mortgage crisis there has been this narrative repeated
over and over on all the financial networks, and by conservative pundits and even by the President of the United States,"People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway." It is a strategy designed to balance the blame on unequal partners.
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