Goat Day #10: I may be a scape goat, but I'm not YOUR scape goat
13This past winter, we had a pretty crappy storm that was supposed to hit and dump a bunch of snow on us. I decided it best to leave work early, get my daughter from daycare, and work the rest of the day from home.
About 2 minutes from my exit, the guy in front of me fish tails into my lane and side swipes me. Nobody hurt, not my fault, guy is insured. A little inconvenient, but this stuff happens all the time and there was very minor damage to my car.
Fast forward to the repairs. I got a rental car (paid for by their insurance of course). Repairs took about a week. I opted to skip the extra insurance. I picked up my car (which wasn’t fixed properly, they completely ignored the damaged areas I pointed out), and dropped off the rental. During the walkaround, the lady starts pushing on the rear bumper, hard. I was inside at the time, so I walked out to see what she was doing. Apparently the car had some damage when I returned it that was not there when I picked it up. There was a gap that wasn’t supposed to be there, and she insisted that it would have been noticed by them. She told me they’d have to send it to the shop, and bill me for it. I refuted the damage, refused to sign the paperwork, took a few pics, and left.
Here is the damage they were talking about, which I got billed something like $645 for.
Too bad for me that I didn’t notice it when I picked up the car. I’m not a car guy, and didn’t know what I was looking for. However, lucky for me that there was a little bit of a scuff mark on that same spot, which they noted when I picked up the car, but I wanted a picture for evidence.
What do you know, that same gap was there when I picked up the car. Fresh snow on the ground, and the rep from the company is even visible standing behind me waiting for me to take the pic. Even with this, it took them over a month to drop their claim.
I never did see that the repairs got done. I still wonder if they pinned it on the next person. Had I not had this photo by chance, guaranteed I’d have been liable for that hefty bill.
Ever been victim to a company screwing you over when they have all the power? Have you ever been able to make them eat their words? What’s your “In yo’ face” story?
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I think it was just a typo. They thought you were a scrapegoat.
It’s not often I need to rent, but I’ve made a habit to do a walk-around video while still at the lot, just in case shit like this happens.
One time, it was down to either a new 200 or a year old Jetta wagon. Opted for the latter because anything was better than a Cerberus era Chrysler.
Checked around; it had 52k miles, which is crazy high for a rental car! Of course, it wasn’t perfect – and they knew it. At the gate: “preexisting damage: all.” 1,100 miles in 2 days, brought it back. “It’s in one piece; you’re good.”
@narfcake Insurance had to take my car back for more repairs. I refused to use the same rental company again. I got a shitty rental, which I was okay with. They didn’t even care to do a walkaround. I did my own, just in case though.
Non car stories - health insurance companies and student loan companies. OMG. Battle them yearly. The year of 2 cancers in one year (cancers 2&3) Cigna refused to pay for a pile of things. In the end I had to call the state’s insurance commission. Took them six weeks (I had already spent over 180 hours battling with them) but I was right and the insurance company was wrong and they paid. I battled them annually. The problem was I then ended up missing the deadline to turn in my paid receipts to the leukemia lymphoma society to get my awarded $5000 to help pay for this crap. BC/BS of Idaho has denied finishing a breast reconstruction (this was cancer number one) despite the federal law requiring this. They called it vanity surgery. Nope. Reconstruction still isn’t finished.
And then I had the problem of a well known cancer center accepting my insurance for 7 months, multiple times, and then retroactively unaccepting it. I told them I’d be glad to come in and return all my surgeries and treatments like a couch since people make treatment decisions based on who accepts their insurance. Took me 8 years but I finally got them to write off the difference between what my insurance paid and the left over balance.
The annual denial I so loved (BC/BS again, this time of MS) was for the radiologists to read the CT scans calling them medically unnecessary. What was even better was when they accepted some and denied the others. Coding error, done annually by the provider likely copying what had been put in there the year before (so I blame them too). I blame BC/BS though as they were refusing to tell me why it was deemed medically unnecessary to have a radiologist read some of the scans. It took a lot of escalation to find out their approvals are by the diagnosis and so if a different diagnosis code is put in there then it is denied.
This year though not as bad. United Health Care denied the second doctor bill. They claimed duplicate bill. I said look at the different provider names, what are they co-joined twins of different sexes so only one bill allowed even though I had two different apts, one with each half of the twin? (They were being an asshat and I was stupid to use sarcasm). One call and it got fixed.
And then we have the 3+ year long student loan fiasco. That would be Sallie Mae, now known as Navient (my sympathies to anyone stuck with these asshats). So I consolidated all my new, but not mostly repayed loans with the federal government. Sallie Mae sent them all over to the feds not just the ones I listed on the form. When they got them back changed the terms, removing the 6.75 years of payments I had made and reset them to be due in 10 years. And they changed the interest rate from fixed to variable. Umm it is illegal to change the term of the loans unless the consumer signs a loan note (not to mention you can’t do that with student loans). Escalated multiple times. Used 3 different advocates within the company. called the CEO’s office who sent me back to advocacy. No one followed through. So I lied. I told them the local law school taught a public service probono class every year (true) and each year they took on a case as a class. They were going to take on mine since all the students had student loans and the class would feel a personal connection to this, learn more about the abuses of the student loan repayment system, etc. and that the professor tells me here is the law you broke (I had hunted it the specific law). I told them if the class took it on I was going for damages and all my loans paid in full (around 115,000 as there were cancer bills in that - student health insurance did not have an out of pocket limit, had a huge deductible and my bills ran over 3 insurance years since I was diagnosed about 3 weeks before one insurance year ended), not just fixing the problem. If they wanted me to back out of being the class’s project, they had by a month before the term started to fix the problem (I told them so the professor could vet another person’s problem) and credit my account the nearly $1000 I had, at that point, over paid in interest. Bingo. Fixed. Makes me regret I didn’t ask for some damages credited to the principle of my loans too as they caved so quickly.
A couple of people have told me I should be an advocate. No way. Eventually I’d be convicted of homicide I am sure - although likely the jury would decide it was justifiable. Damn good thing you can’t reach through the phone to throttle assholes because then I’d be in big trouble.
PS to the story above, when the feds unloaded all our loans I ended up with Mohela (fortunately did not roll downhill to Navient). Had some issues with them too, but at least those I have been able to get solved without going beyond the supervisor’s supervisor and that guy told me any future problems ask for him directly. He better never get promoted or quit. They are far more reasonable and easier to deal with.
@Kidsandliz FYI - Navient is one of the family piggy banks of the one and only Betsy Devos, Secretary of Education.
Educate yourself here.
Elections matter. If you don’t want asshats in charge of healthcare and education to maximize profit, then don’t vote them into office. And blame all of those around you that did for the hell their votes are causing you, directly. And ask them to stop voting for lying sociopath asshats.
@mike808 Didn’t realize she had her fingers in that pot. Can we say conflict of interest. I do vote against these kinds of asshats. The trouble is where I vote those who vote against them are maybe 3% of the people who vote.
@Kidsandliz Tell the 97% of your neighbors to stop screwing you over in the voting booth - make it personal - tell them to think about you and their kids when they vote. I doubt your 97% neighbors are all 1%-ers.
And yes, DeVos is just like the rest of Trump’s cabinet – all self-interested sociopathic asshat grifters to the bone. The fish rots from the head down.
@mike808 None of my neighbors are 1 percenters, 5 percenters or likely even 40 percenters. I have learned not to talk politics with them as any sense of reason has been removed by the disease of trumpitis. A few, very few, are maybe starting to rethink things as they, personally, are affected but that seems to be rare. It’s cult like. Or more likely cognitive dissonance got them big time. I fail to understand this level of irrationality in otherwise reasonably intelligent, decent human beings.
@Kidsandliz @mike808 When you vote, you validate the election.
@Limewater @mike808 Yes I know that.
@Limewater When I vote, I validate the process, not necessarily the results. Ensuring the results are such that I always agree with them is disenfranchising to those that disagree with me, and not a democracy at all.
Make no mistake, that fascist future is exactly what Republican gerrymandering and Operation Red Map is all about - ensuring a perpetual ‘tryanny of the majority’ under the Republican Reich.
@mike808 By validating the process you absolutely validate the result. That’s the whole point of having the process.
@Limewater @mike808
And what are the fabulously and incredibly effective alternatives to create a better world - [and, of course, such alternatives should not be open to being manipulated or abused or gamed: either for evil ends; or “to further great or small injustice”; or for “loss of civilized values”; or for “private power gains”; or similar]?
I’d love to hear about a practical-to-implement algorithm that leads straight to political and social goodness and light, and freedom, and increasing opportunities, and greater civility, and more accurate and incisive discourse, and and higher and increasing knowledge and understanding of ourselves and our world.
Winston Churchill had many and serious strengths, and had varied and devastating profound flaws.
But he was good with a quip.
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
I think most of us are aware that we inhabit a politically flawed world, and engage (or do not engage) with politically, and philosophically, flawed systems.
@f00l
There is a difference between a flawed system and a failed system. Fascism, Xenophobia, Racism, pure Capitalism/Socialism, and party-above-country tribalism are all utterly failed systems.
My votes are against those that advocate for, excuse, or promote those failed systems, and all who support, provide succor, or safe harbor for those that seek not to use democracy for the betterment of all, but to abuse it for false equivalence that the betterment of only those that agree with them can only be achieved by the detriment of those that do not.
@mike808
Re: your votes:
Indeed. So are mine.
So I fucking validate that I live in this fucking real world, I guess. And try to do a little good day.
Re:
Except that, historically, we (the US) have been there before, really badly there, numerous times.
I thought we were above all this “darkness and lying” managing to get the cultural and political purchase it has gotten this time around.
I was wrong.
I do have a deep hope associated with the resilience and eventual goodness and good outcomes in the US political system, even given how bad it looks now. We have come thru far darker times than this one.
I hope that those who voted, in anger and disgust, “against”, rather than “for”;
or those who voted for “perfection” and thus inadvertantly supported what I consider to be appalling darkness:
will strongly re-think, next time around.
And I hope that those who voted for anger and resentment and red-meat, rah-rah slogans and trolling, instead of voting to pursue the hard and difficult search for slow, painful, real betterment, will try a different approach this year in Nov.
And I hope that those who were attached to simplistic cultural myths about what happened to the American middle-class will give that more thought.
My “hope” in the final resiliency and goodness and civility and decency in the US voting citizenry is not akin to religious faith. We can fail.
I hope we have the goods. I think we have it.
But there are numerous horrible historical precedents for what can happen to nations whose citizenry does not finally choose to stand irrevocably for the best of our world’s evolved enlightenment principles.
So …
Maybe. Maybe not.
I try to do my part. In a deep deep red state, I talk to people.
Most of them - who tend toward very conservative - are not happy at all. And share my dismay. And are thinking, or they say they are.
And I still hope.
The wheel’s still in spin.
/youtube the times they are a changing
Oh.
And in the meantime, we are handing everything (ie everything) to China.
But that’s something we can’t even deal with right now.
A small matter, right?
A tiny matter, isn’t it?
/s
: /
Go ahead and name names. This is clearly SOP for that rental company.
File a complaint with the BBB and with the local DA for fraud.
File a complaint with the local city council that issues their business license and likely a conditional use permit for that property. City governments don’t like giving scam businesses a permanent home in their city.
Let them untangle a fraud complaint, just as you were forced to to untangle their mess because they couldn’t stick you with the bill (probably to pay for some other unnoticed damage that corporate charged that location for - and the db franchise owner makes the employees pay for it, which only incentivizes the fraud).
@mike808 Holy crap! They do that to employees?
@Kidsandliz not directly, so its all legal, you know. They don’t dock a specific employees pay, they just ‘eliminate your position’ - or take it out of that franchisee’s performance pay/dividend (and we all know how generous management is in sharing responsibility with the rank and file).
The effect is that the store’s budget gets cut, and as we know from CEOs that make 360+ times the average worker, shit only rolls downhill.
My car broke down New Years Eve at midnight. By the time I walked back to work and got some help somebody had slammed into the ass end of it, totaling it out. The frame was bent and everything.
Insurance co. tried to dispute my claim because they said the premium wasn’t paid. All I had was a little 2 inch square of paper from the money order from the money order I sent in–darn good thing. They eventually honored the claim but dropped me–no love lost there.
Funny I just talked about taking pictures of rentals. Keep them on the phone for a bit and throw them away when finished.
I was recommending it to a co-worker.
@caffeine_dude good idea.
Most recent car story - twice since January I have had to get my windshield replaced. January they broke clips and didn’t replace them. March they broke more (I only later realized this is why that trim was loose), then the trim flew off on the highway and scrape up the door. They did allow that they were responsible, but refused to repaint the door. They buffed it and I am pretty sure buffed through the clearcoat as I went to pick it up and pointed up dull areas. Got it back the next day waxed. Filed a complaint with my insurance company and told them I won’t know for sure about the clearcoat until the wax wears off. So story not ended yet.
Anyone know how long industrial strength body shop wax takes to wear off?
Grammar nazis - yes I have a bunch of typos in that. Too late to edit.
Those bastards. I hope they rot in hell for this. I’m so sorry this happened to you. Stay strong.
Verizon billed me for something like $1,700 in data usage. After 2 mos. pushing them for detailed billing report for the supposed data use they finally sent details. The data usage occurred over a 4 day period. I was out of town in an area without cell coverage and my phone was in my suitcase the whole time I was there. But apparently the phone kept trying to reach out to update weather and news and whatever phones do when they dream. But since Vzn signal wasn’t available the signal was a roaming connection on a network which Vzn didn’t have a datashare agreement, so Vzn bills it as international data roaming at some mind shattering rate like $5/MB plus “fees”.
When I balked, they offered to “do me a favor” and comp 20% of the charge. I let them do that, then walked out without paying the bill. I waited for the disconnect notice, ported out my number to an MVNO and let it go to collections. Deadbeat you say? Vzn crooks says I! Anytime they are prepared to bring their claim to court, I’m happy to accommodate them.
@ruouttaurmind
I wish you had taken them to small claims court.
You would have won. And gotten damages.
@f00l I’m not sure what I might have sued them for? As far as damages, at that point I didn’t have any. After they sent the issue to collections I suppose I could have argued that my credit was negatively affected. But my FICO is fairly robust, so I can’t really even say that did affect my score.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@ruouttaurmind
You could have sued them for false or errorneous billing and claims that you owed them.
And for stress.
I had to take the train into NY for work one day. The daily parking lot really needs to be repainted. I tried to figure out the slot number to pay, but must have got it wrong. A couple weeks later, I got a ticket for not paying. Thank FSM that I took the receipt and kept it! I called and told them what happened, sent the receipt and never heard back. Parking cost was only $3 and I don’t remember the cost of the ticket but I was ready to fight!
@looseneck He boiled for our sins