What Sidemirror?
Tuesday, September 11, 2012 at 2:17PM 
It was annoying when you were involved in a road traffic accident especially when it no fault of your own. Well, that was what happened with Anita last week when our side mirror was knocked off by a Korean parent at school driving past us while waiting to pick Idlan up.
Initially she wanted to settled without any Police reports, but upon finding out how much it would cost, she wanted to make an insurance claim. That meant a trip to the Police Station. Twice! And then, the wait for insurance clearance. Annoying stuff.
It had been a week. And things were yet to be settled. And now with Irfan being unwell, that would have to wait a little bit longer.
Haris Abdul Rahman
It turned out that the car was parked illegally when the accident happened. The Korean mother got away scott-free! Damn!
A downer
We have been looking around for an MPV for the best part of the year. The momentum took-off again recently and for the last couple of months, Puan Anita have been looking around for a deal. Initially I wanted an Estima but after browsing a few other alternatives, we considered the Mazda and SsangYong. Finally after a visit to a showroom and giving away our preference, one of the local dealer drove to our house an Estima that was just the right colour and spec. It was love at first sight.
The loan was sorted out. The car - being a reconditioned model, was being done nicely. All the paperwork as far as the authorities were concerned were completed, including a couple of afternoon trips to the back to sign documents. We were due to receive the delivery this afternoon in time for the long Deepavali weekend. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of letting one of our family friend handled the insurance policy. My God, he was fussy. I suspected that he was not happy that we looked for the car ourselves. We thought we involved him for the insurance as a courtesy as the dealer - who have been consistently excellent - have got a policy ready should we chose so. From the beginning, this family friend of ours have been harassing both my wife and the dealer. Everything came to a head yesterday when he insisted on a GPS tracker being installed. According to him, should the GPS tracker not installed, there will be no insurance.
The answer to that was simple. Either he gets it installed for us on his expense, or we just pick another policy instead. No brainer. He went on to abuse our dealer for not making sure that a GPS tracker was installed from the start, sounding as if it was the dealer’s fault and we were being tricked into buying the car from him in the first place! Sigh! So here we were. No MPV until next week. Moral of the story, don’t do any business with a family friend if one can help it! And before you even think about it, both the dealer and the insurance guy are Chinese. It was not a race thing. Or so I thought!