"Goodbye and good luck to all the promises you've broken Goodbye and good luck to all the rubbish that you've spoken Your life has lost its dignity, its beauty and its passion You're an accident waiting to happen"
Yesterday we said goodbye to one of our senior coaches. A likeable man who I've known for the past decade, and seen him turn from youth to grown up, father and everything. He's made mistakes, who hasn't, and he's still absorbed words from others, made his own decisions, and gradually something else crept up on him. Respect. He gained respect, and that's good to see, and his new job, will, I'm sure be good for him and he'll be good for it. Everybody wins, cool, eh? That was a good goodbye.
I did an angry goodbye to the AA Home Insurance "Services" today, as I did so, calmly, I accidentally engaged my quietly sleeping Quaker. Indeed, I gave the poor woman on the help desk a bit of a lecture in the meaning of truth. What happened is the AA gave me insurance quotes for buildings and contents of something like £770 per annum with an alternative next best quote of over £800. I was shocked. This is a lot of money. Taken out of my account monthly it's up there with my gas and electric bills. My household monthly budget is tight, and gets tighter with every price hike, and that was one hell of a hike.
Because I believe that organisations such as the AA have integrity, I thought OK, fine, they are a big organisation, they'll trawl many other companies to come up with those quotes, and if that's the price they've given me, that's the price it is. I nearly accepted it. Right up to the line indeed. But then I, out of curiosity, checked out some price comparison websites. All the quotes given came in at under £500, and after a long and careful study of just what the cover was for bicycles, the quote from Barclays of around £270 seemed pretty much spot on.
So I phoned the AA, to simply cancel the policy. I didn't phone them to try to get the price down because I believed in their integrity. My own personal standards of honesty are what I expect the norm to be. The woman I spoke to suggested she have a look at giving me a "discount". I found myself explaining that no, I didn't want a discount. I trusted the AA to have offered me what they felt was a fair price, and that if they were an honest organisation then there was no conversation to be had, I simply wanted to cancel the policy. Which I did.
But I still have a bad taste in my mouth. But I have a single standard of truth.
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