So simple, a caveman could foul it up

I'm currently both ticked off and baffled by my car insurance company. For you to understand my mood, we need a bit of history. Six and a half years ago, I moved from upstate New York to the South Hampton Roads area of Virginia. It was 5 or 6 months before I got around to buying car insurance here (i.e., I waited till my previous policy was about to expire). Since my previous insurance company failed to respond to my request for a new quote, I signed up with a new one, which shall remain nameless. They returned my calls, and gave me a decent rate, although they required one thing that was both inexplicable and a bloody nuisance: Because I had been separated from my husband for less than a year, and was not yet divorced, they insisted that insurance regulations required them to put his name on the policy too.

Never mind that he lived 600 miles away and had his own car insurance -- apparently, without a divorce decree in hand, I had to wait a year to convince the insurance company that he wasn't ever going to be driving my car. If I wanted insurance, his name had to be on the policy. Oh, and by the way, they needed his driver's license number too. Too bad it wasn't just his Social Security number they needed -- I had that memorized almost 30 years before -- but since New York no longer used the SSN for driver's licenses, I was forced to call him and ask for the number. Fortunately, we were on reasonably good terms, though he wasn't at all pleased about having to be listed on my policy.

So, for months all my correspondence from the insurance company came addressed to both of us, even though he had never lived at that address. When I eventually bought a new car and called to have it added to my policy, it was almost exactly a year since we had separated, so I asked to have his name taken off the policy. They did so, and that ended that. Or so I thought.

Fast forward five and a half years, to tonight, when I logged into the insurance company website to check on something. Imagine my astonishment to see that the "Welcome" message addressed, by name, both me and my long-divorced ex! Mind you, I've logged in to my account many times since they supposedly took his name off the policy, and it was never there before. (Trust me, I would have noticed.) It also has not appeared on my policy declarations, bills, or insurance cards, including the renewal paperwork I just got today. But on the website, under the "Driver" information tab, there he was, listed as the "co-insured".

Well, I have no idea how or why they resurrected this more-than-five-years-outdated information, but I immediately clicked on the link to remove a driver from the policy and filled in the reason as "Divorced - requested removal in 2002". Before long I got an email saying I should call customer service to handle this request. So I did, and explained that I thought it a bit odd that this should turn up after five years of absence. I never got any explanation of how this could happen, though the CSR did delete him from the policy (again) after I assured her that no, he did not reside here; no, he had never resided here; no, no one else resides here!

At that point, evidently she decided she ought to check to see if any other information was out of date, and asked me a couple of random questions including where I was currently employed. I informed her that I am unemployed. After some more fiddling with the computer, she allowed as how my rate was decreasing by something like $12 per six months and she would make that change. I asked why the rate was going down (I know, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but this was totally unexpected). I didn't get any kind of satisfactory answer -- something about "based on the information you gave me..." -- so I finally let it drop. I'm left wondering if it has to do with being unemployed (in which case, shouldn't it apply back to January?), or having a phantom ex-husband removed from the policy (ditto, but back five and a half years?), or what. I guess I should just not worry about it, as long as it's a decrease and not an increase.

I think they'd do better having the cavemen run customer service.