Wednesday, June 21, 2006

What a morning!

This morning - after discovering last night that a bunch of my electronics were no longer working - I went, with several of my neighbors to our rental office to see what the rental company was going to do about the power outage and everyone's devices that got fried.

Well, it turns out they said exactly what you would expect.

1. It was not THEIR fault, but that of Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE)
2. That we needed to call BGE and file a claim.
3. If we did not have renter's insurance, then we'd probably be a$$ed out

Fortunately, I have had renter's insurance the past couple of years. It's only about $100 a year for me and my car insurance provider (Erie) provides rental insurance as well. Honestly, I didn't want to get it at first because I didn't think that anything would ever go wrong and because I could use that money to pay for other things. But in the end, I got the renter's insurance because they pitched it to me well when I got my car insurance. Boy am I glad.

So I left the rental office and returned home to call BGE and my renter's insurance company. BGE basically told me that if I didn't have renter's insurance they'd do nothing for me. And then went so far as to tell me they didn't reimburse for fried electronics that they fried (yeah right) and that I should contact my renter's insurance company. Basically, they knew I had the renter's insurance (it was the first question they asked when I told them the story) so they knew they could blow me off and tell me to go holla at the renter's insurance folks.

In the end, I called my renter's insurance company and they are taking me through the process of putting a value on all my devices that got fried and putting me in touch with a claims adjustor. This process works just like the car insurance process would if you got hit (which I just went through back in May). So hopefully I can get reimbursed for all these devices that are now broke. Wish me luck.

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