Nothing’s as Simple as Promised
I’m at a loss to explain it. The routine, and the not-so-routine, actually used to be fairly simple to deal with. Maybe it was because you could count on dealing with human beings. Now we have not-so-smart AI agents being prematurely foisted upon us on top of the already unresponsive automated telephone systems.
I don’t know who thought complexity was a good idea. Leonardo da Vinci, who knew a bit about these things, believed great design revolved around simplicity. Any time you stick an electrical or software engineer in charge, you can rest assured the answer will not be straight-forward.
Hence, the computer age has made nearly everything more complicated, more time consuming, less reliable, and harder to fix. The opposite used to be our goal. Someone sold us a bill of goods when they claimed “the computer will make the world better, smarter, and easier.” Obviously, it hasn’t turned out to be that simple.
Sure, it’s allowed many things to be improved upon, as it can help solve complex mathematical and design problems. But many things in this world have gotten harder to deal with and more confusing, with less communication and fewer avenues to solve problems. And so it is with my latest insurance fiasco.
Today’s insurance companies do not primarily perform the purpose for which they were created, that is, to form and protect large groups of people from major disasters by equally sharing losses. Today’s insurance companies, first and foremost, have become profit machines. Clients are pestered for more and more information, credit ratings are used against them to raise rates, and claims are stalled by understaffed departments who are directed to always say ‘denied’ as their first response. The longer they can hold onto your money, the more they will make.
Today, as insured victims, we fight not only the insurance companies but those millions who have learned to game the legal and law enforcement systems to their advantage. Lawyers are only too happy to fatten their wallets by representing liars and cheats for things that fifty years ago would have been laughed out of court. The person who sues first is always the victim, and always right. The defendant has no chance.
Trying to prove a negative, or one’s innocence, is how we operate today; the burden of proof is on the accused, not the accuser. That is wrong! Yet, we allow its prevalence to grow. So, now I fight the establishments – the court that issues me a ticket without a police report, and the insurance companies that that apparently want a piece of me.
I’m being blamed for rear-ending a cut-in-line and slam-on-the-brakes driver that no prudent driver, superhuman or robot could have avoided. I’ll be lucky to get out of the ticket by hiring a lawyer. I’ll be luckier still to escape the pre-determined mindset that a rear-end accident is always the fault of the car in back. See? Guilty, until the accused can prove themselves innocent. We used to be so much better than that. It makes one want to move as far away from the madding crowds as possible. I’m frustrated and saddened by that.
