assholes

This just popped up in my RSS feed from Judy Callingham.

It cheered me up no end, thanks Judy.

I had the severe mis-fortune of having to go get some supplies for the camping trip. It was hot, sticky, humid and the worst animal of all was out in abundance at Botany.

Traffic and fool pedestrians who think that in a car vs. human accident they will win, were everywhere. But the single worst driving menaace are f*ckwit drivers who think that it is acceptable to back into car parks.

When I am dictator for life, the first people against the wall will be drivers who back into car parks.

These wankers sit blocking up the traffic waiting for a car park then someone BEHIND them drives off, they then slam their car into reverse and attempt to take the car park. In the laws of car park driving, they have forfeited that spot…they drove PAST it. Just because they like to park by backing into car parks doesn’t give then a right to take the car park.

The backing skills of “back parkers” also leaves a lot to be desired, most using the braille method of distance control.

They need to be shot.

The only thing worse than “back parkers” is caravan, trailer and boat towers travelling during peak holiday season. That is another post, though I think you all know what the punishment should be for them…yep…same as that for “back parkers”.

Maybe I will have a taser warning system in place for first offenders, second offenders get a more permanent solution for their inconsiderate behaviour.

Fidelity Life has a brand, they say they are the New Zealand Insurance company, yet when you ring them almost exclusively you get a South African accent. Even their tame psychiatrist Anthony Asteraidis is a South African.

That isn’t so bad. When you check their website to find out just how wonderful they are you get nonsense like this:

Our values

Being part of Fidelity Life means you are part of an extended family of New Zealanders.  We have a wide network of talented people who are dedicated to making Fidelity Life a friendly, progressive and trustworthy insurance and investment company.We strive for both excellence and integrity, and see all our staff, suppliers, policyholders and advisers as PART OF OUR BUSINESS – PART OF OUR FAMILY.

Our values are:

• Listening & Responding
  We engage in dialogue to create value through our relationships.
• 100% NZ Owned
  We retain our original focus to “keep faith” and care in times of need.
• Stewardship
  We make wise and prudent use of resources entrusted to us for safekeeping.

Let me tell you line by line exactly what that crap all means.

For the privilege of paying your premiums you would expect them to mean what they say. That is true while you are paying your premiums and not making claims. The agent even pretends to be your best mate as he swans off to South Africa on a Fidelity Life funded holiday. When the crap really hits the fan though what you get is treated like the unwanted idiot son of your cousin, the guy who shits himself in public and plays with poo. You know, everyone has a relative like that. That is what Fidelity Life means when they say you are part of the family.

They aren’t lying, what they mean is that you are part of the family that they would really rather not have to talk about.

Let’s talk about “a friendly, progressive and trustworthy insurance and investment company” shall we. Fidelity Life has put 5 case managers on me. Some couldn’t have cared a fig for me, my welfare or anything else. Just so long as I sent my forms in they cared enough to check to make sure that if I had forgotten they could stop a payment. One case manager in particular was assigned to me to get rid of me as a client. She told me that. She told me to my face that I was a difficult customer and that she was going to sort me out. She even told me after the first time they cut me off with no evidence or reports to justify their actions that this was to “tune me up”. She said it at Fidelity Life‘s HQ in Grafton. She is also  the one who told me that I should really just go and book in a series of ECT to get the pain over and done with. I’m serious and I’m not making this up. That is exactly what she told me to do. I remember that day like it was yesterday, I even remember Raylean’s name and I remember that she too was a South African. This is the caring , trustworthy insurance company called Fidelity Life.

Trustworthy is an interesting claim to make, particularly when you send Private Investigators after you. They were dumb private investigators though because I caught them. It isn’t really trustworthy either to send letters to you booking appointments with Fidelity’s tame doctors to highlight in bold that if you fail to make the appointment then your payments WILL cease. Yep, just like that, bold and underlined. No matter that they plan to cease your payments anyway once they conclude with their doctors.

You see this trustworthy, friendly insurance company called Fidelity Life sent me along to their doctors. What they didn’t say was that they had specifically asked those doctors to find out specific things. Only one doctor had the honesty to tell me before the meeting what the purpose of the meeting was. One thing they wanted to know was whether I was taking illegal drugs. Another was if I was malingering. The answer that all of those providers to Fidelity Life was emphatically no.

The trustworthy Prof. Gorman, sent me to see a psychologist to conduct some test to see if I had an underlying head injury. Just in case there is something untreated, don’t worry, mate, it is just some routine tests. Not surprisingly both Prof. Gorman and Ralf Schnabel found that no I didn’t have a head injury, that yes I did suffer from above average depression amongst other things like hypo-mania, and hyper-vigilance. They used these reports to say that I was fit for work because my cognitive functions were high.

I had made a claim for and been accepted for depression, and not although I still suffered depression, and indeed, one eminent doctor has said that the ongoing actions of Fidelity Life have cause me to under go three additional severe depressive episodes, but because I have high cognitive functions and no brain or head injury I was now unilaterally fit for work and the payments were suspended forthwith. Oh and for a nice see you later present they offered me $50,000 just so long as I signed a piece of paper that meant that I could never, ever claim for depression again for the rest of my cover of 25 years. They were ending the claim unilaterally without discussion, transition or anything else, and ending any further claims for the next 25 years and trying to get away with that for $50,000. Nice trustworthy Fidelity Life.

Think of it this way. If I had cancer and made a claim and Fidelity Life accepted it, then subsequently sent me for test to see if I had three testicles and then came back and said “Great news, you don’t have three testicles, you can return to work”. I would still have cancer and still unable to work, but not in the warped world of Fidelity Life.

So you see dear readers, you mustn’t really believe what insurance companies write on their websites. They like to obscure the reality of how things work. They would like to obscure that people will lose their houses, be impoverished, place their marriages in jeopardy, all because they have no integrity, do not honour contracts and cast you aside without a care int he world despite their flowery words.

I think I might start a campaign for an inquiry into the life insurance industry, the claims that they make in publications, and their deliver of service. I mean it would be a good idea if National are to consider opening up ACC to competition to conduct such an inquiry to ascertain whether or not private companies like Fidelity Life can be trusted with aspects of the ACC account. Perhaps a select Committee inquiry? Yes I think that is a fine idea.

sent in by  Fidelity Wife

Dirty Tricks Manual Fidelity Life Case Manager guidelines ( part one )

1. Make the liability customer feel at ease. Their claim has been accepted because due to the overwhelming medical evidence from their own doctors there is no way that we (Fidelity Life) can weasel out of it, the medical evidence supports their claim.

2. Arrange for the first monthly payment to be made and immediately go to phase one of the undermine and destroy your liability’s customers self esteem

Phase one: Send a private investigator to wait outside the liability’s customers house every morning. Do not concern yourself with blending in. You want the liability customer to know that they are under surveillance.

Phase two: Follow the liability customer whenever they leave their home. Have the PI follow them on foot into shops etc and stand there behind a newspaper looking like an actor from a bad 70′s T.V series. If the liability customer approaches and makes it clear that they know that they are being followed, instruct the PI to immediately scurry back to their car and then initiate phase three.

Phase three: At every meeting with the liability customer mention how poor insurance companies have to protect themselves from lying cheating liabilities customers but then assure the liability customer that you are sure that they are in fact ill as that is what their doctor reports state after all. However they must understand that the poor insurance company cannot let down their guard even for a second, and that if anything, no matter how small, changes for them they must immediately inform the company as otherwise the consequences will be dire as they will assume the worst.

Phase four: By now the liability customer is scared well aware of the consequences and will inform you when they leave the home and what they do during the day. Once you have established that they are leaving the home most days and have some kind of routine established total how many hours they are spending out of the home. Do not worry if this time is spent at the gym, hanging out with a friend or going for lunch, it all helps with Phase five.

Phase five: This part is fun important and will reward the hard work you have put in thus far. It tunes up makes it clear
to the liability customer that Fidelity Life is not a company to be trifled with. With no warning cut the payment in half. Say that they have established that they can work because they are spending x hours away from home. Explain that X hours subtracted from the monthly amount equals 50%.

Phase six: When the liability customer points out that they are not in fact working or earning for that period of time and that the policy does not reduce until they ACTUALLY have a job make sure that you say nothing and just wait. The goal here is to starve encourage the liability customer so that they will be more attentive to job seeking despite it being clear that they are fucked in the head suffering a mental illness. Once they get a job you can then say if you have a job you must be 100% well, if you are well then you no longer are covered by the policy.

Phase seven: If phase six fails after 3 months reinstate the policy and backdate the missed payments. Apologise and explain that as some liabilities customers are liars you have been forced to test them to see if they are being honest. Ignore any mention they make of Doctors regular reports that state that they are ill. Specifically call them in to the Fidelity Life Offices and explain to the liability customer that it would really be better if they went and got ECT. The short sharp shock will be better for them in the long run. If they react or tell anyone about this just deny it happened, they are loony tunes mentally ill anyway and no one will believe them.

Phase eight: Patience is your friend here. After the tune up education programme the liability customer will be suspicious watching our every move. Wait another year then repeat phases five through seven.

Phase nine: It is now clear that the liability customer isn’t getting the message getting well, we must move now to slashing minimising Fidelity Life’s exposure to the liability customer. implement Phases 5 through s7 except this time make it 100%, and dig in for the long haul. Constantly explain delays in response as “waiting for the re-insurer”. The liability customer will eventually give up suicide seek better cover elsewhere.

I said the gloves were off. I said that it would come. I never back down on my promises. This is the start and it isn’t going to end anytime soon.

Barry was in a squad of seven non-firefighters who completed the annual Firefighters Sky Tower Challenge, all in the name of raising money for the Leukaemia and Blood Foundation

The group, made up of Barry, Leukaemia and Blood Foundation chief executive Prue Etcheverry, Sky City chief information officer Mike Clarke, Auckland Airport chief information officer Tony Gollin, Fidelity Life chief executive Milton Jennings and Dave Howard – a man who won a competition on Trade Me for the chance to compete in the challenge, was the third squad to race up the building.

That is so nice for Fidelity Life‘s Chief Executive to do that, oh how sweet. Of course he is all smiles and waves for the charity but in the background, the company that he runs has made my life a living hell. This of course will all play out in court, and it will all play out very publicly because, well because I can and will.

With just three days till I have to sell the house my will to resist biting has gone, might patience, and some would say I have been very patient is at an end. From this day forward through Social Media, through Television and through any medium I can use I will tell my story along with anyone else’s stories of how insurance companies like Fidelity Life, but Fidelity Life in particular like to take a risk but don’t like to honour contracts, pay out on those risks and generally fuck with peoples lives.

This post is now an open invitation for anyone who has ever had a problem with Fidelity Life, their claims people, the doctors in their pay like Anthony Asteraidis, Prof Des Gorman and Ralf Schnabel to let me know your story and I will bring it to the public’s attention.

I will blog on how they wear you down, how they make shit up as they go along and how they obfuscate in order to get you to bend to their will. I will explain how the whole insurance industry use a select few doctors to get what they want and keep their patients medicated in the mistaken belief that they are cured.

Very soon when you google Fidelity Life it will not be their website at the top of the search, it will be mine and the special category I am going to create just for them. The hurt is immense and this hurt has to go because my life is hell. The ONLY way I know to deal with it is via my blog and my writing.

There isn’t much I am good at but this kind of thing I am very, very good at. I will just have to do what I am good at.