Screw Geico and its caveman and its lizard with a red hot poker. My payment increased 80% in one month and I am not able to get any explanation for this because their system is down for “routine maintenance.” This is IT speak for “Reality has caught up with our last jury-rigged work-around and we have to cobble up a new one.”
Speaking of IT quackery, there was a break in at my office building tonight. A passerby heard the howling of the alarm and called the cops, who then called me. I was almost there when the alarm company called to report that my alarm had gone off. It took their responder another 30 minutes to arrive, by which time the cops had wrapped up their investigation and left. There was no damage other than a broken door glass. I was only there to finish nailing a piece of plywood over the door. Later I called the alarm dispatcher to find out why the system had taken so long to notify anyone. He told me he had gotten the call late himself. It turns out they don’t do the monitoring themselves but farm it out to a boiler room operation in some third world hole, like Bangladesh or maybe Amarillo. He couldn’t get the exact times of the various calls for me: It seems that the alarm company’s computer system had gone down, their IT guy was not answering his phone, and the dispatcher had been told to close up shop and go home. This left the various clients without service until the IT guy can be rousted and set to work fixing things. All things considered, it’s probably not much of a loss.