Been having a spate of bad luck with my car recently...
First was the "hit another car while trying to get out of difficult parking lot because blocked by another badly parked car" incident on Boxing Day. I resisted the urge to:
i) drive off and pretend nothing happened but feel guilty for rest of my life;
ii) leave a fake note with a wrong handphone number and feel even worse for the rest of my life because I actually expanded effort to cheat someone; and/or
iii) put *Shinta's number on note and hide head in sand while *Shinta deals with it.
This being my first driving scrape with another moving object, I had absolutely no idea how to deal with it, and proceeded to bomb my insurance agent's handphone inbox with a million SMS questions on how much it costs to claim insurance, would my premium go up, how about my no claim bonus....?
Luckily for me, the other party was fairly reasonable and nice. I guess the fact that I didn't do items i) and ii) above helped. We managed to come to a settlement amount and agree that both sides would not claim insurance. It's a little suspicious that the settlement amount was exactly the excess that I would have had to pay, but after consultation with others (read: people who get into more car accidents than me), figured that it should be roughly within the ballpark range and since it was my fault, there would be no point disputing it.
In the end however, I still delegated all interaction with the other party to the more experienced *Shinta to handle. As for the damage to my own car? Well the spot that was hit has already been dented, scratched and left with paint residue from 2 other incidents with stationery objects, so there's really not much point doing anything about it. It'll probably just get hit again soon!
One very annoying thing about Singapore. The regulations changed recently so that all insurance claims must be reported within 24 hours. Are people that free to go do it immediately??? Furthermore in cases where the damage is slight (as in this incident), they would need to get the repair costs estimated first before deciding whether or not to claim insurance. Luckily for me this time round, both the other party and I were on leave and relatively free to settle all the issues.
The second incident was an embarrassing "my car cannot start" in a very popular carpark. No, I did NOT leave my lights on, it was simply that the battery was not in a good condition anymore and had died. If I had left the lights on, I would have realised it was a battery problem, gotten my cables out (yes I DO have them and know how to use them), put on my most helpless look and tried to wave down another car for help. Since I didn't leave my lights on however, and the battery still appeared to work (radio etc), I thought the problem was more serious and with the engine.
After waiting a hour for the service repair to come, I still had to endure the stares from all the passing cars while my battery got changed. I bet everything was thinking that I was the useless driver who left the lights on and deserved it... *sigh*
The one saving grace was that I had reversed park and saved myself an even more embarrassing "push car out manually".
First was the "hit another car while trying to get out of difficult parking lot because blocked by another badly parked car" incident on Boxing Day. I resisted the urge to:
i) drive off and pretend nothing happened but feel guilty for rest of my life;
ii) leave a fake note with a wrong handphone number and feel even worse for the rest of my life because I actually expanded effort to cheat someone; and/or
iii) put *Shinta's number on note and hide head in sand while *Shinta deals with it.
This being my first driving scrape with another moving object, I had absolutely no idea how to deal with it, and proceeded to bomb my insurance agent's handphone inbox with a million SMS questions on how much it costs to claim insurance, would my premium go up, how about my no claim bonus....?
Luckily for me, the other party was fairly reasonable and nice. I guess the fact that I didn't do items i) and ii) above helped. We managed to come to a settlement amount and agree that both sides would not claim insurance. It's a little suspicious that the settlement amount was exactly the excess that I would have had to pay, but after consultation with others (read: people who get into more car accidents than me), figured that it should be roughly within the ballpark range and since it was my fault, there would be no point disputing it.
In the end however, I still delegated all interaction with the other party to the more experienced *Shinta to handle. As for the damage to my own car? Well the spot that was hit has already been dented, scratched and left with paint residue from 2 other incidents with stationery objects, so there's really not much point doing anything about it. It'll probably just get hit again soon!
One very annoying thing about Singapore. The regulations changed recently so that all insurance claims must be reported within 24 hours. Are people that free to go do it immediately??? Furthermore in cases where the damage is slight (as in this incident), they would need to get the repair costs estimated first before deciding whether or not to claim insurance. Luckily for me this time round, both the other party and I were on leave and relatively free to settle all the issues.
The second incident was an embarrassing "my car cannot start" in a very popular carpark. No, I did NOT leave my lights on, it was simply that the battery was not in a good condition anymore and had died. If I had left the lights on, I would have realised it was a battery problem, gotten my cables out (yes I DO have them and know how to use them), put on my most helpless look and tried to wave down another car for help. Since I didn't leave my lights on however, and the battery still appeared to work (radio etc), I thought the problem was more serious and with the engine.
After waiting a hour for the service repair to come, I still had to endure the stares from all the passing cars while my battery got changed. I bet everything was thinking that I was the useless driver who left the lights on and deserved it... *sigh*
The one saving grace was that I had reversed park and saved myself an even more embarrassing "push car out manually".
No comments:
Post a Comment