Thursday, June 29, 2006

More Car Insurance Wackieness

First, I apparently didn’t post yesterday’s blog that I sent an update out for.  So I’ll start with yesterday’s drama.

Yesterday, I was all set to go into work when I discovered something.  My rental car had a flat tire.  So not only did my week go totally not as planned, but I added a flat tire to the car accident et al that happened early in the week.

I must admit that I was just shy of breaking down and either crying or laughing hysterically.  I chose to laugh instead of cry, but I could feel myself just a hair’s breadth from losing it yesterday morning.  I didn’t, but now I’m driving a Pontiac GrandAm instead of the Dodge Stratus that had a flat.

And I can now say that I don’t want to own either vehicle.  The Stratus had no accelleration, and the GrandAm get’s pretty crummy gas mileage as compared to my injured Corolla.

Now, for today’s car drama.

I had a call yesterday evening when I got home from State Farm, the insurance company who insures the young woman who hit me on Tuesday.  They said to call as late as 7 PM, but since I got home at around 9, I waited to call until I got into work this morning.  When I called, I had to leave a message.  No big deal, they were busy.

Two hours later, they call me back.  State Farm tells me that they’re covering all the damage on my Corolla, which is totally cool.  They ask if I have a body shop in mind, and it turns out that the one I want to use (based on the experience of my wife and others in the family) is a preferred shop for State Farm.  Good so far.  And they’ve responded fast enough that I figure I’ll cancel the claim with my insurance company and just work straight through State Farm.  They say that’s fine, but I’ll need to call my insurance company.

I then call my insurance company, and because the agent who is handling my claim is busy, I leave another message.  She calls me back about a half-hour later and tells me that they’d be happy to cancel the claim.  I give her the go-ahead only to realize after I get of the phone that I still need the rental car.  So I call my insurance company back, talk to the agent handling my claim, and she says I need to get that set up with State Farm so they’ll pay the rental costs instead of my insurance company.  No problem.  She asks me to call her back when I’ve got the car rental switched over.

So now I call State Farm back again and ask them to transfer the rental car over to their responsibility.  They say no problem, ask me from what date, and I tell them from the date of th accident.  They don’t have a problem with that.  But they need to have the car into the body shop, and until I’ve got the body shop set up to pick up the car from the towing company who took it off the highway, State Farm can’t finish up the rental car.

Confused yet?  I’m not done.

The next thing I do is call the body shop.  They’ve got all the information from State Farm already (computers are a wonderful thing), but they say I need to set up the transfer and release of my Corolla from the towing company to the body shop’s preferred towing company, oh, and can I find out what the storage and towing charges have been as of tomorrow, when the car will be picked up?  I say sure, thinking that this is something that I figured State Farm or the body shop would take care of themselves, but whatever.

Next I call the towing company that hauled the Corolla off the highway on Tuesday and ask the guy to tell me what the charges are for the Corolla.  He can’t since he’s out towing another vehicle somewhere and the company is just him, his truck, and his storage yard.  But he confirms what I thought, namely that towing companies usually take care of this themselves, without involving the owner of the injured vehicle.  He says he’ll crank out the numbers when he gets back to the yard, but doesn’t know when that will be.  I tell him the name of the body shop’s preferred towing company, and he’s all set to transfer the car to them tomorrow.

I hang up with the towing/storage guy and call the body shop back.  They’re understanding, and the guy I’ve been working with tells me that he’ll transfer my stuff to the guy in the office who handles all the State Farm claims, since guy #1 is going on vacation starting at 4PM (which at this point is about 1.5 hours away).  I tell the body shop guy #1 that I’ll call again later and try to get the charges so that the car can be transferred tomorrow (since most towing/storage places won’t release cars without being paid first).

Then, because State Farm wanted to know when I’d set up the body shop so they could finish setting up my rental car, I call State Farm back again.  They’re very helpful and get everything set up with Enterprise rent-a-car so that State Farm is paying for the car instead of my insurance company.  Then I call my insurance company back again and talk to my claim agent and tell her that the car should be all set up with State Farm now, so she can finish canceling the claim.  She suggests that I call Enterprise just to be sure that they’ve moved everything over.

When I call Enterprise, I’m brain-dead enough that I call the wrong branch.  But thankfully, the branch I call is a daughter-branch to the main branch I got my car from, and the guy, very VERY helpfully is able to check that the Stratus is still under my insurance company.  Ok, first problem is that I’m driving a PONTIAC GRAND-AM, not the Stratus with a flat tire.  Second problem is that the computer still shows that my insurance company is paying, not State Farm.  I point this out, and he digs a little deeper into the computer, finds that State Farm is going to take over the payments on the car, and says that he’ll be able to take care of it for me.  So I don’t have to call the main branch and fix everything up with them.

But wait, there’s more!

I wait about an hour, and call the towing/storage guy back.  He’s still not back at the yard, and he’s floored that the body shop is making me do all this myself, and he says so.  But he says he’ll get the charges all worked up and take them with him if he’s off towing a vehicle tomorrow so he can get that information to whomever calls him tomorrow for that information.  He’s being reasonably helpful, thankfully, even if he seems to have a bit of a dour personality.

When I get of the phone that time, I call the body shop back again and ask to talk to guy #2, the State Farm claim guy, but he’s on another line.  So I leave a message (that’s three messages I have had to wait on to get responses from, in case you lost count), and I have to admit, I basically say “I’m having a rough time here, and while I’m not going to out-right ask you to take over all my communications with the towing/storage yard guy, I’d really, really like it if you’d take over all my communications with the towing/storage yard guy, because he said I shouldn’t have to do hours and hours of legwork myself when everyone’s being paid by insurance instead of by me personally.” Ok, I didn’t say quite all of that - some of it was subtext in my thoughts.  But more of that came through than I intended.

I take off away from my cube long enough to go to the toilet, and when I get back I have a message from the State Farm claims guy at the body shop.  He’ll take care of getting the charges from the towing/storage yard guy tomorrow and will let me know when the car is in his posession, and that because of the July 4 holiday, he probably won’t have an estimate until Wednesday or Thursday.

At this point, I’m just about ready to implode.  And that’s when I realize that, in all of this, I’ve forgotten to ask State Farm if they’ll pay to replace the possibly damaged car seats.  And so I call State Farm yet again (4 calls, and 4 different agents) and ask about the car seats.  They respond that they’ll have to wait on the pictures back from the body shop to determine whether the accident was bad enough to require that the seats be replaced.  If so, they’ll pay for “comperable” car seats.  But we won’t know that until next week sometime too.

Oh, and in all this were two calls to my wife to keep her appraised of the situation.

Needless to say, I didn’t need all this crap today.  The only bright star in all of this was that all the agents and the guys at the body shop were wonderfully helpful.  I can say that, thus far, it’s been a pleasure working with the claims people from both insurance companies.  Well, as much of a pleasure as it can be considering the nature of the fact I needed to make a claim, but still.

I just want my car fixed.....

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Bad Week

This week has not been good to me.  First, my plane from Seattle to Denver was 1.5 hours late leaving Seattle due to weather in Chicago, so I got into Denver at ~1 PM Monday morning.  Then yesterday afternoon I find out that my cholesterol is a little high, so I need to figure out some way to exercise more with a potty-training 2 year old and a not-even 3 month old.  (Not that I didn’t need to do this already, but higher than ideal cholesterol means that it’s more important that I do it sooner than later).  And then today, on my way into work, I get to be the middle care in a three-care pileup on US 36.  I’m just hoping that nothing ELSE happens....

I don’t think my car’s totaled, even though the radiator cracked, but ultimately that’s the insurance company’s call, not mine.  When I went back to the tow company’s yard, I snapped a few cameraphone pictures.

Monday, June 26, 2006

Spiritual Songs and a Prayer

I got home last night late enough that it really qualified as this morning.  My plane was supposed to get in at 11:30 PM but got in at about 1 AM instead.  Which meant that I was driving home exhausted and with the radio blaring to keep me awake (with a little help from the food group known as caffine, of course.) Well, on my way home, I heard a song that sent chills up and down my spine.  Good chills, but chills nonetheless.

You see, there are songs that invoke in me a spiritual flare of energy for one reason or another.  Songs that are so powerful that I can’t help but be moved.  Some songs are so joyful I nearly break down into tears, others so horrible that I can only sit there in visceral disgust, and still others that literally help me connect the spark of the divine within me to the divine that is the world all around.

Unfortunately, while I can’t remember the song’s name, or even enough of the words to really do a Google search on the song, I remember the feeling it invoked in me last night as I drove home from DIA - great concern over the future of humanity.  And that concern drove me to do something that I only rarely do.  I prayed to the Gods.  This was my prayer (paraphrased, since I don’t remember the exact wording):

“Gods, our nation and our world is plagued by the violence of extremism and fundamentalism.  Insofar as I am a human being, and through my DNA and my ancestry I am related to every person and living thing on the planet, I ask this as a representitive of humanity.  May the ideologues of the world be replaced by pragmatists who want to solve humanity’s problems instead of exacerbate them.”

I realize that it’s remarkably arrogant of me to even consider speaking for every human being, especially when so many disagree with my faith, my country, my politics.  I’m ok with that.

Monday, June 19, 2006

Vacation

I was in San Diego this last week for a vacation and to be nearby to Santa Barbara, where my sister-in-law graduated from UCSB yesterday.  While I was there, I read the San Diego Union Tribune (not the best paper I’ve ever read, and generally too conservative for my tastes, but by no means is it so unbalanced as, oh, I don’t know, Fox News), but that was pretty much it.  Literally.  Until the last two days, I didn’t read my usual news and commentary sources, namely The New York Times, The Washington Post editorial page, Google News, the BBC international news site, The 5th Estate, and The Moderate Voice.  Not one of them did I even desire to read for nearly a week.

It was wonderful.  Glorious, even.  To be nearly totally free of my blogging responsibilities, my news-junkieness, for nearly a week, was heavenly.  So was my wine-tasting in Santa Barbara County (oh, and the Sideways Pinot Noir is the Hitching Post Pinot Noir.  And it’s not very good pinot noir - I don’t recommend it.  Try a good Oregon PN instead.), but I digress.

Blogging is fun.  I enjoy it most of the time, even if it’s been quite a bit of work recently with a potty-training 2 year-old and a 9 week-old baby.  And it’s always been a good venting outlet.  But it’s always nice to take a complete and total break from pretty much everything.  Not the kids (although, with my wife and kids not back until July 1, I get that too, albeit serially with the rest of the vacation), but pretty much everything else.

It also made me realize just how long it had been since I’d really had a break.  I didn’t even really take much of a break after my son was born, since I put in something like 16-20 hours from home the week after we brought him home.  And now I’ve had my vacation, I’m pretty refreshed.  Tired from traveling all day, but refreshed for work and blogging and catching up on the news in a way I haven’t been for probably a month or two.

And that’s a wonderful thing too.

Monday, June 05, 2006

The Micro-Pundit:  Iraq War Documentary

A couple of days ago, I stumbled across a BBC article about a new documentary premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York titled “The War Tapes.” It’s shot not just from the perspective of three soldiers in Iraq, but BY those three soldiers.  And those three soldiers footage was winnowed down from over 800 hours of footage from 8 different soldiers in Iraq.

And based on the BBC article alone, I think that this documentary might be required viewing for anyone serious about understanding the Iraq war.

The website for “The War Tapes” is available here.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Fencing the Border

Illegal immigration is a big deal these days.  And one option being kicked around for stopping illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border is to fence it.  I understand the appeal of the idea, but I have a question for supporters of the idea:

How are we going to pay for it?

According to Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), the sponsor of the amendment to the House bill that added 700 miles of fence to the border, the plan is to duplicate the dual and triple layer San Diego-Tijuana fence California across 700 additional miles of the 1951 mile-long border.  Which means that we can use the costs of the 14 mile-long San Diego-Tijuana fence as a baseline to start estimating the costs of a similar fence.  According to an article on Globalsecurity.org and an NPR Q&A, the San Diego-Tijuana border fence was initially estimated to cost about $1 million/mile, but has thus far cost $42 million, and it’s not done yet.  The last 3.5 miles to be completed are expected cost an additional $35 million due to the rough terrain that the fence cuts through.  Thus the average cost of the San Diego-Tijuana fence for its total 14 mile length is about $5.3 million/mile.

If we assume $5.3 million/mile, then the 700 miles of border fence proposed by Rep. Hunter will cost about $3.71 billion.  The Senate approved 370 miles of fence in the Senate immigration bill, which would cost about $1.96 billion.  If we want to fence the entire 1951 mile-long US-Mexico border (of which about 5% are already currently fenced with barriers that don’t need to be replaced or repaired), then the average cost of a San Diego-Tijuana-style fence along the entire border would cost about $9.8 billion.

Not too bad, all things considered.  Except that these costs are only for the fencing material itself, and may not even include construction labor costs.  The costs don’t include the cost of road construction required to get the materials to the border.  It doesn’t include the costs of exercising eminent domain on border properties to purchase enough land for the border and roads.  It doesn’t include the costs of electronics to monitor the border for damage and people crossing the fences.  And it is a huge assumption that the terrain around San Diego is roughly equivalent to the terrain over the rest of the border when in fact, the terrain along the rest of the border is actually ROUGHER than the terrain between San Diego and Tijuana.  And the costs also don’t include the maintenance required to keep the fence secure and in good repair over its entire length (rock and mud slides and human smugglers with bolt cutters will do a LOT of damage, and probably on a weekly basis).

Oh, and let’s not forget the costs of subterranean sensors to catch smugglers and drug cartels tunneling UNDER the border fence.

Taking these extra costs into account, we can reasonably estimate that the actual cost of the fences will be 3-5 times the raw material cost.  This would work out to be $11-18 billion for Rep. Hunter’s fence, $6-10 billion for the Senate-approved fence, and $30-50 billion for the entire border.

In an era of massive budget deficits and deep federal debt, and when the “supplemental" spending on the Iraq war is adding about $6.5 billion per month directly to the federal debt, can we really afford the billions of dollars it will cost just to build a US-Mexico border fence, never mind the ongoing maintenance costs?

Theoretically, pulling out of Iraq would free up a lot of money to put into border fencing, but as I mentioned at the link above, the Iraq war spending is “supplemental” and added directly to the national debt instead of being budgeted like it should be.  So we’re already paying for a war on the national credit card, and we shouldn’t swap one unsustainable debt (Iraq war spending) for another unsustainable debt (border fencing).  So where else can we get the money?  Seriously, if you’re a border fence supporter, I’d like to know where you’ll find the money.

Personally, in my not even close to being humble opinion, we cannot afford to fence the border no matter how much we might want to.  Other priorities (education, economic development, health care) are FAR more important.  And from what I’ve read, we’d be better off pumping the money into development in Mexico and the rest of central and South America in the form of local development grants than we would be spending the money on a fence.  Local economic development will keep immigrants home far more effectively than fencing would keep them out of the US.

We already have a monumental task ahead of us with regard to putting our national finances in order.  We simply cannot afford the money it would cost to fence ourselves in right now.

(As a final note, if the US does ultimately fence the entire US-Mexico border, it will NOT stop illegal immigration.  Illegal immigration is like a capped tube of toothpaste – clamp down on one area and it’ll pop up somewhere else.  And the somewhere else may be the US-Canada border.  And if we can’t afford to fence the southern border, we certainly can’t afford to fence the 4500 mile-long northern border (about 1000 miles is in the Great Lakes and presumably wouldn’t need a fence).  At $5.3 million per mile, the fence would cost about $24 billion more, and between $72 and $120 billion total when you include roads, sensors, etc.)

For more information, the Wikipedia article on the US-Mexico border barrier is another good source in addition to the other links included in this blog.

[crossposted to The 5th Estate]