Nationwide Is On Satan's Side

So after all the toiling that goes into buying a house, having great helping in finding said awesome house, we are in. The final and end result that gets you into a house would be homeowners insurance. Ah, yes.

Not too hard to do if you have car insurance already right? You just call up an agent and get it hooked on with your car insurance and away you go? Not if your name is Ryan Bigg and you work for Nationwide. Ryan is special. Very helmeted special indeed. He started out by not keeping in touch with my financing officer in the beginning so that we could close on our house early.

Something tells me he took a few days off to stay home and play WoW, so he was a little more than busy and couldn't help us out as quickly as we needed it to be done. I understand, I mean all that Mountain Dew is not going to drink itself.

So we missed an early closing, and moved in a bit later. Ryan was sooo confused when I was mildly upset about this. I guess his mom never gets mad at him when he doesn't do his homework. Well, after much bumbling and fumbling on Ryan's behalf, and after he managed to ask many repetitive questions over and over and over again, he somehow managed to wizard wand me into getting homeowners insurance.

Maybe I wasn't grateful enough. Maybe I should have mailed him a gold star. "Yay Ryan you do job goodly!!" But, alas, I was too excited to be in my new home to be thinking about sending gold stars. But, Ryan, he likes to remind me that he misses me.

So he calls me last week while I am at work. He wants me to call him back to tell him about this visual inspection they have done and that my roof is in poor condition and that they saw a dog on my property that didn't look like a chihuahua! He would like to know if we did an inspection before we purchased the house, and if we can send it to him.

I assume Ryan just misses my voice, silly guy, he knows we did the inspection and sent him the report! It was one of their terms before they could insure us! To appease Ryan though, I call him back and let him know. Oh Ryan, he lost the report. I understand, keeping a customer's information on file isn't really important when you have SO MUCH sitting and staring blankly at your desk wall thinking about nothing to do.

So I have my Realtor send him another one. But Ryan just isn't ready to let me off the hook just yet. He is such a goofy friend, wants to get some more jabs in and says that they saw a dog on my property that wasn't a chihuahua. Well the funny thing, Ryan, I haven't even brought my dog over to live with me yet. So no, we don't have any dogs. Ryan starts goofing with me again, forcing me to list all of the neighborhood dogs that live within the perimeter of me. I think it is ridiculous and I don't like this game, but I play along.

I mean I have been with Nationwide 12 freaking years, what could they possibly do. Well, a week goes by. I come home yesterday on my birthday ready to die from tired. I have a letter from Nationwide informing me they are canceling my homeowners insurance due to my collapsing dilapidated roof, and my mystery ghost dog that wanders the premises and haunts the neighbors.

Okay, Ryan isn't being funny anymore so I call and speak with his supervisor. Weird, they are such pranksters at Nationwide because his supervisor bears the same mental semblance as Ryan. I list off the slew of problems I have had, the supervisor feigns interest and shock, and then says they will talk to the underwriter about us making the minor repairs that really don't need to quite be done on our roof just yet in the spring. They are from Iowa, but they must think we are from Antarctica over here, because they say they cannot wait until spring because our winters are so cold and horrifically cruel. Um...has anyone else been able to compare a Midwest winter to ours around here.

Yeah. Also supervisor informs me that even if they inspector said the roof has a good four years on it, Nationwide will not consider that, it has to be five years. "Awesome" I tell him. So great that they were willing to approve and put through insurance from me, only to pull it out saying they would have never considered in the first place. "How does this make sense?" I ask Ryan's dad...er supervisor. "The only thing that would make this make sense is if the person that insured me was totally incompetent, and that actually does make sense because that is the only thing that has happened that far that has been a consistent pattern." Supervisor fumbles saying that maybe there is a tiny possibility that Ryan missed that when processing the paperwork. Ryan and the underwriter that has to approve that right????

Oh man after hanging up the phone on the supervisor and a few curse words later, I bet Ryan gets at least 5% docked off of his QA score that they give him at work when they make sure employees are doing their jobs right! I bet he has to stay at work an extra ten minutes to talk to his boss about that too!
But just in case not, I decided to shoot Ryan a little email to thank him for all his help. Here you go!

Oh here is his email address too: biggr@nationwide.com



Ryan,

Just a quick note to thank you. For if they were to give out awards for incompetence in employees and for their lack of caring about other human beings, and for being completely incapable of doing their job in a studious manner, you would be the shining beacon of light that encompasses all of the above. For starters, you never stayed in contact with my financing person so that we could close on my house in an orderly and quick fashion, you managed to lose my inspection report twice, and to top it off you went above and beyond my expectations by insuring me with homeowners insurance when it was brought to my attention yesterday that Nationwide will not even consider insuring anyone with a roof that has four years left on it.

I do appreciate the phone call that you did not make to me to let me be aware of this as well. That was great. You must have known it was my birthday yesterday, because oh my God, that was exactly what I wanted for my 30th birthday. It was so good to come home after a long day of work, get ready for school after approximately five hours of sleep, and then to find an insurance cancellation notice in my mailbox. You must have read my mind on things that I wanted for my birthday. Scrambling to get insured again, not doing schoolwork, and missing dinner, that was definitely on the list. You are too kind. Really, thank you for keeping it a surprise, and not calling me up to inform me that this was coming, I don't know how you managed to keep that one under your hat.

Apparently now every dog, child, piece of trash that happens to wander in my yard now becomes my property as well. That is good to know. It seems as though I will not have to pay for things as much as I used to have to since according to Nationwide, once something touches my yard, it belongs to me. If I need a new car? I will be sure to push one onto my lawn, according to Nationwide law, it's mine! New dog? Let one wander onto my property, Nationwide says it's mine!

I would also like to give my most deepest and heartfelt thanks to the fact that even though I have been with this company for 12 years, you guys seemingly don't seem to bat an eye in considering helping out your customers when it comes to situations such as these. But then again, why would a big company care about someone who has measly old car insurance with them. I am sure you don't care either, you care about punching in and going home at night. Not actually how the fact that you don't know how to read an inspection report and compare it with your actual company policy when insuring someone can have an effect on them.

But in the end, Ryan, you have taught me one thing. Oh wait, you have taught me nothing. This situation is banal and predictable. Big company screws little people, employee doesn't care.

After all you have not done for me, I feel like I really should do something in return though. At the advice of my attorney, I will be filing a complaint on Nationwide for the fact that you insured me and then yanked it out from under us under the premise that your supervisor told me that maybe you just managed to miss the little part where it says that Nationwide does not insure people with four years left on their roof. I figure since you guys have done so little, it was the least I could do for you.

Have a great day Ryan, you are the anti-best.

Dominique