dhiren.za.net

Friday the 13th of July ended up being quite an unlucky day for me. I went to a friend's housewarming after work, and ended up getting home around 11pm, to find my flat had been broken into. What annoyed me about this time (I had a similar break-in just over 3 years before) was that this time they left a huge mess after a pointless search.

My cupboards have a lot of small boxes with junk in them. So do the cupboards in the spare room, from when my sister used to stay there. For some reason, the burglars thought that the boxes might contain something of value. So they dumped all the boxes all over the place hoping to find something, but found junk instead. And they didn't have the courtesy to tidy up afterwards. So after creating a huge mess, they ended up taking my laptop, some external hard drives that were plugged into it, a bit of jewellery, and the minipc-previously-known-as-my-webserver. And all of that stuff was lying out in the open, without them having to dig through stuff.

It sucked because I ended up being without a laptop for a good few weeks, and I had quite a mission convincing Outsurance that I actually knew better about my computer spec requirements than they did, because for some insane reason they insist on replacing stolen property rather than paying out. Right from the start, I asked if I could be paid out, as I'm very fussy about my computer equipment and I knew they'd screw it up if they replaced them. They decided to replace. Not only that, but they initially said they weren't covering the minipc because its "portable" and wasnt specified as such.

So they got me a new laptop, which was for the most part much better spec'd than the one that I'd lost, except for the fact that it had the lowest possible screen resolution available. So first I queried the non-coverage of the minipc, because although it is small, it's not a portable computer - you still need a separate screen and keyboard and stuff, so you're not going to be taking it around with you, to have to specify it as a portable computer like a laptop. Eventually they conceded and decided to replace the minipc. So I got a call from a replacement company confirming the specs of my "shuttle pc".

So I asked them to rather pay me out instead, because I wasn't happy with the laptop they'd given me, but since I had opened it, I'd settle for being paid for the minipc so I could buy a new laptop that I was happy with, and use the other crap-resolution laptop to replace the minipc. Nope, they insisted on replacing it. So I told them that they'd already screwed up the specs on my laptop, and their replacement company was about to screw up the specs on the minipc by replacing it with a completely different model altogether, and this is what I had said was going to happen right at the start, so can they please pay me out. Nope, they were going to replace. So I said, if the issue is with giving me money, can they rather replace the minipc with a laptop that I will be happy with instead, and I'd pay in the difference. Nope, I'm claiming for a minipc, so they will replace it with a minipc (even though their replacement company was about to replace it with a shuttle pc instead!).

So I said fine, if thats the attitude they were going to take, then they can replace the minipc, and if they screw it up I would send it back and make them replace it again, and since they insist on replacing the exact item that was lost, they would have to take back the crappy laptop even though I had opened it, and replace it with one that had a suitable resolution, and if they screwed it up again, then I'd send it back again, and I'd keep sending them back until they replaced it with something that I was happy with.

They paid me out.

If only they'd done that right at the start, I could have had my new laptop within a week instead of 3 weeks later. Maybe I should tag this post "Outsurance sucks" like the italk sucks story from earlier this year...