As mentioned elsewhere, I've been circling a Milwaukee Tractor with intent to buy. Being occasionally careful with money, I figured it maybe a good idea to get an idea how much it'd cost me to insure before I take the plunge. So I'm calling CN to find out how much it'd cost me to add to my policy - "that'll be 32 quid". "OK, but as you can see my policy expires in less than a month and I'd really need a quote for the renewal premium?" "Very sorry but we can't give that to you because we haven't got the rates for next month yet" Eh? So they put me through to the renewals department to allow me to continue the argument. I pointed out to the (admittedly rather nice) bloke that I had been bit by brokers giving me "rough" quotes before that went from "quote" to "sorry, we don't insure these and I can't imagine why anybody would've told you different" in the space of a couple of months and I really, really needed the quote *now*. Which I didn't exactly think was too much to ask. No can do, siree, earliest we can hopefully give you one is early next week. When I pointed out to him that this was very nice but utterly useless given that I needed to tell the owner of the bike today (Tuesday) if I was going to have it or not and I really needed to get an insurance quote to see if that was feasible at all, he switched into the kind of tone that you usually get in family gatherings when sentences like "poor guy, he hasn't really been himself since that brick fell on his head" are being thrown around. So now I've got a couple of numbers that aren't worth the money that I didn't pay to phone them up and am none the wiser, apart from the notion that CN *really* is going to the dogs. Given that phone monkey #1 did make sarky comments about me adding two bikes to the policy in one month didn't help. Ebike oddly enough didn't have a problem quoting me at all but there's the small issue of getting an NCB sorted (all bikes are on my classic, non-NCB CN policy). Plus, with ebike I'd need two policies as their modern bike policy only covers up to four bikes. Grrrrr.
