Unsubscribe Here

This is the time of year when all my guardian pigeons come home to roost.

Because December is a month in which I spend most of my time saying, ‘I’ll do it after Christmas’, January is a month filled with Insurance Renewals and Extended Warranty extensions (the capitals are my own).  I watch the TV, I know that Extended Warranties (I’ve started now, so I can’t stop) are seldom worth the paper they are no longer written on, but attempting to stop the myriad purveyors of same from contacting me annually to remind me that I haven’t extended yet is something I take, on average, about 3,000 hours per domestic appliance doing.  Each little ‘Cancel’ button that I cyber-press brings a ‘Did you really mean to do that?’ email, followed by a ‘Follow this link to confirm that you really, really meant to do that’, and ultimately a text assuring me that, just in case I hadn’t really wanted to do that, in case I am so mentally enfeebled that I do not understand the implications of a button marked ‘I never want to hear from you again’, they will contact me again in a year’s time to check.

The general reaction to an ‘Unsubscribe’ request is ‘Hey boys, I’ve got a live one here’ followed by yet another email to check whether I really, really wanted to do that.  The whole frustrating rigmarole providing a signal to the kettle that it is time to noisily give up the ghost and trip the electrics for half the village while it is at it, thrusting all access to the internet into an inescapable wormhole and setting the little wheel on my laptop screen spinning into eternity.

Insurance policy renewals – as opposed to the five year conditional Extended Warranty on my tin opener – are not quite so easily ignored.  I have learned that I must not simply allow these things to auto renew as my reward for many years of loyalty is a premium that is seriously more than that of a newbie.  So, I become a newbie.  I re-register every detail from my renewal notice into a new on-screen application form that tells me, after several hours searching for my birth certificate, my marriage certificate, my ‘O’ level Art certificate; measuring my floors, calculating the average pitch of roofs and counting bathrooms (within the strict definition of the policy) that I do not exist since my email address has an unauthorised integer and my phone number is too long.  A simple typo of course, easily cured by an explosion of cursing and starting all over again.  My eventual reward is a policy that costs me only marginally more than last year’s, but does not cover damage to ‘sanitary wares’ – particularly annoying since I am attempting to renew my car insurance – resulting in a three hour on-line ‘chat’ during which I try (unsuccessfully) to persuade an AI employee that I did not intend to insure my home ‘Third Party, Fire and Theft’.

It is a month-long task that leaves me wondering whether I should subscribe to some kind of ‘We Renew Your Policies’ website – obviously based in Moscow – that deals with it all in return for nothing more than total access to my bank account details, medical history and a promise to allow anything up to one hundred people to open credit agreements in my name.  Also that I make a minimum of one kidney available for transplant on request.

But never mind.  I can unsubscribe next year…