2 days ago
9
My son hates swimming and is protesting against being driven to yet another lesson when we realise our car is gone. Searching proves fruitless, so we check the Trace system for impounded cars. Shortly after we bought it, three years ago, our car was impounded because we didn’t realise we couldn’t park across the street. This was not our finest moment, but one we now find ourselves desperately hoping we’ve repeated. There is nothing on the system except for a reference to the original impounding, complete with date stamps of when it was returned to us for a small fee.
We call the police non-emergency line, sitting through dozens of automated messages telling us all the reasons we should not be calling, before giving up and reporting it online. Within an hour, I’ve received an email saying the car has been impounded after all. Embarrassed but delighted, we call the impound who tells us they do not, in fact, have our car and that the police must have looked at the old case, with its clearly signposted dating, and mistakenly believed it to be a current incident.
The impound man, sensing my exasperation, checks his system and tells me our car did get a ticket three days earlier, a mile from our house, on a street we’ve never been to. I use every bit of phone-jitsu I possess to finally reach a human police worker so we can explain this situation. She apologises and makes a note of the parking ticket and promises an update. We get one shortly afterwards, stating that the case is closed because there are no witnesses, and directing me to a link for more information. The link returns a charming 404 message of a bloodhound in police uniform. It is searching, presumably, for what’s left of my mental health.
Phoning the insurance company makes the police experience seem like a trip to a spa, as every possible decision tree terminates with them sending me to their website’s chatbot. When I tell the chatbot that ‘My car was stolen’, it tells me it doesn’t understand and asks if I need breakdown assistance. It does not, I gather, mean the kind of breakdown I am currently experiencing.
After five or six calls to different numbers, I get through to someone in the life insurance department who agrees to take a look. He confirms that our policy does cover theft, but that I should use the website. I tell him of its inability to comprehend the concept of theft. He eventually discerns that I’ve been silly enough to use the website that we were made to signed up for when we got our insurance, which holds all of our details and documentation, when I should have signed up for a separate website connected to the same policy, which no one has ever mentioned before and which is not referenced anywhere on the first.
Once set up on this new system, we file the claim. We blink. We exhale. For the first time in hours, we glance towards our son, who has been enjoying a heavenly period of unsupervised Netflix viewing.
‘So, no swimming then?’ he asks, tentatively.
‘No,’ I reply, with a thousand-yard stare.
‘Yes!!!!’ he says.
