You’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t been frustrated by their insurance company.

Imagine calling your insurance company when you know you are the victim, but they claim you caused the accident. Would you fight it, or would you accept defeat?

In this story, one man ended up accepting defeat, but then he had to fight it in order to switch insurance companies.

Check out how the story plays out.

So, insurance company, you won’t give me a letter with a clean driving record?

My wife was driving in Toronto many years ago. At an intersection, she waited at the red light, and then the advance “green left arrow” lit up and she started turning left.

Other vehicles coming the opposite direction also had the same “green left arrow” for them to turn left. It’s pretty standard stuff. Everyone’s been through those while driving.

Not standard enough, it turned out.

Unfortunately, the driver coming straight the other direction wasn’t paying attention.

He saw the vehicle next to him start moving (turning left), so he did too (going straight), through the red light, and crashing into my wife.

So I call the insurance company. I’m thinking this is pretty straight forward; my wife was legally turning left, buddy ran a red light and hit her.

It wasn’t that easy.

Nay, nay, they tell me… My wife was turning left, so regardless of right of way, she’s deemed equally at fault.

She should have anticipated someone would run the red light and waited to make sure he was going to obey the law.

I grumbled, but they stood firm. That ruling was nonsense, but it wasn’t a fight I was going to win.

The damage was mostly cosmetic to the side of the car; $4k to repair, but the car was perfectly drivable and wasn’t unsafe. It was also an older second vehicle we rarely drove anyways.

So, instead of getting it repaired and watching my rates subsequently go up 100% for the next five years, we shrugged and told the insurance company that we wouldn’t claim it and take care of it ourselves.

It was far from as simple as that.

Fast forward nine months, and we’re moving somewhat unexpectedly to another province. My insurance company doesn’t have jurisdiction in that province, so I need to change companies.

I do, and new company wants a copy of my clean history from old insurance company.

When I contact the old insurance company, the female employee at the counter tells me that they can’t give me a clean driving record because we *were* in an at-fault accident, so they will have to tell the new insurance company that.

She wasn’t going to budge.

I give them my best “are you freaking kidding me?” look.

She refuses to budge. “Rules are rules, and it would be dishonest”.

Rules are rules?

OK, I go home and I look up the company’s rules. It seems that I have one year to process a claim. I come back an hour later, and smile at the nice lady.

Here’s where he plays the new Ace up his sleeve.

I tell her that if I’m going to get held liable for the accident on my record, I darn well might as well fix it. I’ll have it fixed, get a rental car throughout, and basically run the repair bill as high as I legally can.

Then I’ll send a notice to the company head office explaining what I did and why I did it, advising them that I admired their integrity in not providing the letter, even though they cost their company over $5000 in unnecessary expenses.

I got a long pause. “Well, maybe we can find a work around.”

It was a very happy ending.

Ten minutes later, she ended up providing me a letter, stating that I had a “claims-free driving history” with the old insurance company.

Not accident free. Claims free.

That satisfied the new insurance company, and life went on.

Man, insurance companies are the devil.

Good for him for fighting that nonsense. “Claims free” was a good workaround.

Here is what folks are saying on Reddit.

Sad, but true.

Wow, that’s rough.

Everyone has a story.

It’s weird that they didn’t forsee his play.

I hope this helps others.

They call this winning.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.