This morning we went to the funeral of our best friends’ father. It was, as funerals go, a lovely service and after the funeral and the burial we headed off to the wake, only to have someone’s hilux slam into the driver’s side of our car on a tight bend. They’d skidded and come onto the wrong side of the road by just enough, given the tight corner, to make the impact. Thankfully speed, alcohol or drugs weren’t in play, just the wet, and even more importantly, no-one was injured. Dignity will be lost any time it’s driven without a passenger though – the driver’s door can’t be opened from the inside:
The case is with the insurers, and we’re waiting for an assessment next Tuesday to find out whether the car will be repaired or written off. It would be a shame if it’s written off; it’s a Toyota Avalon, circa 2001, and while those cars were frumpy they were damn good cars. With only around 120,000km on the clock it’s not really all that old. About 3 or 4 years ago it was almost completely totalled in a massive hail storm on the central coast; as I recall the repair was in the order of about $12,000, and it only scraped through for repair on an insurance value of around $14,000. Now, with insurance of $7,500 and the repair estimate saying that it’ll top $5,000, age is against the car and it doesn’t look good.
But, this blog isn’t about my hassles, or my car.
It is however about insurance, and insurance is something I’ll be dealing with quite a bit over the coming days. Or I will be, once we hit next Tuesday and the car gets checked out by the assessors.
When we think of “backup as insurance”, there’s some fairly close analogies:
- Backup is insurance because it’s about having a solution when something goes wrong;
- Making a claim is performing a recovery;
- Your excess is how easy (or hard) it is to make a recovery.
Given what’s happened today, it made me wonder what the analogy to “written off” is. That’s a little bit more unpleasant to deal with, but it’s still something that has to be considered.
In this case I’d suggest that the analogy for the insured item being “written off” is one of the following:
- Having clones – seems simple, but if one recovery fails due to media, having clones that you can recover from instead are the cheapest, logical solution.
- Having an alternate recovery strategy – so for items with really high availability requirements or minimal data loss requirements, this would refer to having some other replica system in place.
- Having insurance that can get you through the worst of events – sometimes no matter what you do to protect yourself, you can have a disaster that exceeds all your preparation. So in the absolute worst case scenario, you need something that will help you pay your bills, or ameliorate your building debt while you get yourself back on-board.
Of course, it remains preferable to not have to rely on any of these options, but the case remains that it’s always important to have an idea what your “worst case scenario” recovery situation will be. If you haven’t prepared for one, I’ll suggest what it’s likely to be: going out of business. Yes, it’s that critical that you have an idea what you’ll do in a worst-case scenario. It’s not called “business continuity” for the heck of it – when that critical situation occurs, not having plans usually results in the worst kind of failure.
Me? I’ll be visiting a few car-yards on the weekend to scope up what options I have in the event the car gets written off on Tuesday.
