Reassured

In the end, dumping our insurance agent wasn't as satisfying as I'd expected. She's essentially a high functioning E- who doesn't understand the most basic technology. (I once asked her to send me a document as an attachment to an e-mail and she said, "I don't know how to do that.") But she was also a pleasant enough person to deal with, so when she responded to my breakup e-mail with "I am so sorry to lose you as my customer. I hope one day you will return" I felt a momentary twinge of sadness and a fleeting need to gently disabuse her of her hopes. Even if we did seek coverage from AmFam again, we wouldn't go through her. We only ended up with her in the first place because she's who ended up with our file after the sharp young thing we originally contracted with left the business.

Not that our new agents are particularly bowling us over with their competence. On Monday, I walked into their office a few blocks from our house, got an estimate, and told them I'd need to discuss it with my partner. "Is e-mail okay?" I asked, was told "Yes", and given an address to contact. The next day, I sent a message saying we were ready to proceed. No response. Yesterday I called the office and left a message. Nothing. Several hours later, I called back and found out that the agent I'd first talked to was on vacation. So he'd given me an e-mail address knowing no one would be checking it for several days? Way to land a new client, dude.

The sad thing, as I told monshu later, is it's not like you really need to know anything about insurance to work in an insurance agency. Our new policy was generated by typing a few salient facts into a piece of bespoke software. With only a bit more patience, I could've gotten the exact same estimate from using the company webpage; the only reason I didn't, in fact, was to get a feel for the agency, since the real skills involved are all basically communication skills: Are they responsive? Are they accommodating? Are they pleasant to deal with? So far, not too impressed, but hopefully it's all moot for at least another year.

Speaking American

So I had some fun last night playing with this map. It's basically just another way to view the data collected here, the chief advantage being that counties where more than 10% of the population speaks a language other than English at home are colour-coded, so it's easier to spot some intriguing islands of multilingualism in a sea of English.

Take, for example, Jefferson County, Iowa. In the map it's coded blue for "Other" and mousing over will tell you that the most-spoken LOTE (Language Other Than English) there is Hindi. So far I can't find any explanation for this. I had better luck with a couple of anomalies from my home state. When I saw that Sullivan County, in North Central Missouri had the highest proportion of Spanish-speakers in the state, I reasoned, "Must be a meatpacking plant." Yup--Premium Standard in the county seat of Milan[*]. I was more confused by the prominence of an "Other West Germanic language" in nearby Scotland County until I saw a population breakdown by religion: 20% Old Order Mennonite.

Mostly, the distributions are what you'd expect (provided you know about, for instance, the Acadians in Maine or the Hmong in Minnesota), but there are some surprises. I wasn't surprised to find a high proportion of non-English-speakers in the eastern Aleutians, but I wasn't expecting to find that the most-spoken LOTE was not Aleut but Tagalog. And though I knew there were a lot of LOTE-speakers in Miami, I wouldn't've put the proportion above 72%.


[*] First syllable as in "mile", i.e. /ˈmaɪlən/.