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In my previous summary, your hero left off by filing a written dispute of the ludicrous claim settlement offered by Allstate. In a nutshell, they didn’t pay for anything at all of significance with regard to the damage inflicted by hurricane Irene.

Well the game is still going here. What they do is continually rotate your claim dispute among agents, who in turn claim to have called the customer, send you a letter saying “we have tried to reach you but you never answer and will cancel your claim” over and over again.

In fact I have called each of them at least three times, leaving detailed voicemail each and every time and I have not spoken to an employee of Allstate since the claims adjuster was on my property in front of me.

This is a carefully orchestrated fraud here. There is simply no way this is accidental. Every one of the myriad of phone numbers they have to reach me have voice mail and call history logging on the accounts. I mean they have just plain *never* even called, not even once.

All I can tell any of you reading this is to be sure you dump Allstate before you learn your lesson too. My roof (the one they claimed was undamaged) continues to pour in water even in the lightest rain causing sheet rock to fall in through the ceiling. My out of pocket expenses were almost $9k for the repairs to heating equipment and they never came forward to do any mold abatement work either so the long term effects of all of this are still to be determined.

I was offered a few hundred dollars for paint and sheet rock repairs without any remedy for the actual fix for the problems.

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Some lessons learned from Allstate Insurance, just a warning to any friends who have a policy with them for homeowners.

They have declined to cover what is close to a $10k bill to replace a water heater and furnace that were damaged by water when my sump pump wasn’t running due to the power outage we had. The water killed the electronics in both and I was ordered by the gas company to never use them again…after having had the fire department here for a gas leak and CO alarm when I re-lit the pilot.

Mind you, nothing unusual was going on, just normal water accumulation and once power restored after four days, the pump pumped out 8″ of water in the basement in only 30 minutes. This wasn’t flooding or runoff, this was just normal accumulation that happens any time it rains here.

It turns out that they have a hidden loophole they don’t inform their customers about. For a pittance of $20-$50 annually they would have covered up to $10k in damage from the sump issue. Trouble is, they don’t tell anyone about this. So for not paying $140 in total policy increases they are trying to make me eat $10k in repairs.

With a roof leak that was caused by the storm, they finally arrived today to do an evaluation and ruled that there was no damage. I have a ceiling that is constantly leaking now and all they are paying for is paint and sheetrock. If I just replace that, it will just leak right through in a week or so anyway. Of course, having to eat the furnace repair, leaves me with pretty much nothing to fix the roof. Fun.

They are completely useless and I recommend highly that if you have a homeowner’s policy with Allstate that you dump them for anyone else as soon as possible, before you too find out how little they will do for you.

** UPDATE

16 SEP 2011

Allstate finally pays out… a whopping $751. They still deny the claim on the $8500 repairs for the furnace and water heater entirely. This check is for the roof damage that caused a permanent leak, where a ceiling is falling inside.

$751 isn’t even enough to pay for the materials to do this repair myself, it would be a few grand easily to have this properly repaired.

I have filed for a review, but it looks like I would have to sue them to get them to make good at this point. We’ll see.

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So in my ongoing saga dealing with an incompatible Biostar A770E3 mainboard and AMD socket AM3 CPU bundle that TigerDirect sold me; it now appears that TigerDirect simply has no technical staff that really understand their product lines.

So after posting rants here and on Twitter, TigerDirect actually responded and escalated my issue.  The problem is, even in their best intentions, they still do not understand the issue at hand.

The short form is

The Biostar A770E3 claims socket AM3 support, and the bundle shipped with a Phenom II X6 1100T.

The motherboard ships with a BIOS too old to recognize the AM3 Phenom, so it needs a BIOS update.

However, in order to even do the BIOS update, Biostar requires booting on an old Sempron/socket AM2 CPU.  It’s right there in their own manual.  There is no other way to do the update.  So if the customer doesn’t have an AM2 CPU kicking around, they cannot make this work.  I know, it’s crazy.

So trying to get TigerDirect to understand this has been impossible.

The latest contact from them suggested they will happily trade my AM3 for an AM2 so my motherboard will work properly.  I mean really…the _entire_point_ of this new system is the CPU it all revolves around.

TigerDirect, do you really have nobody left on staff that understands your products at a technical level?

This has been going on for days now, plenty of time to have escalated this to at least *someone* who might understand.  I spoon fed the suggestion of how to escalate this on my very first phone call.  I specifically recommended they escalate this to an actual product specialist; not so much for my own benefit, but so that they wouldn’t continue to misrepresent this product combination to future buyers.  Still not getting it though.  Sadly, this is what I suspected.

So it seems that TigerDirect are trying their best to resolve my issue, heh, but ‘best’ is certainly a relative term in this context.

I should have my new Gigabyte mainboard from Newegg tomorrow, so as this simmers down, I’m just learning from my mistake and learn from it I shall.

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