I just received a phone call from a person named Crystal at Allstate Insurance, the purpose of which was to check that I am still happy with my policy. Um, no. I canceled both our policies over a month ago and took out new ones with State Farm. The question should have been: How was I unhappy with my policies? Let me count the ways.
My agent quit the company and never informed me, resulting in countless messages from me on his answering machine which were never answered. They once received my payment ONE DAY later than the due date and the next morning there was a rude notice from Allstate tacked to my door. After many years of being their customer and never missing a payment. I couldn't believe it. There is a twelve-day grace period, so I wasn't really late by normal calculations. From that point on, I hand-delivered my payments to their office instead of trusting to the mails, and in fact, I left payments on both policies in their mailbox after the office was permanently closed because there was no indication of it. I knew that they normally locked their door for lunch and it was lunchtime, so I made what turned out to be a wrong assumption.
After I changed to State Farm, it turned out that the vin number I had given them for my car, which I got from our old Allstate auto policy, was wrong. In other words, there was no vehicle with that vin number registered in California and if we had been involved in an accident, we would have been considered uninsured drivers even though we paid Allstate for years to keep our policy in effect. Since the vin on the car was hard to read, I got it off the car's title, and I believe we are now legal. (Allstate had changed a letter and a number, which was never discovered although they continued to renew our policy every six months.)
Crystal's call today is yet another indication of how severely out-to-lunch Allstate is. Apparently, they are not aware that I canceled our policies with them, which makes me happier than ever that I did. It's good to know that there is always room for more La-La in La-La Land.
