The Fence

Every morning when I wake up the first thing I do is to look out my window to look at my front yard. It is a nice view with of lots of green, the early birds everything just look so fresh at dawn. This is something that I never had the opportunity to enjoy when I was working in Kuala Lumpur, a place that I will never like even though I spent all my working life there.

One morning around mid-January this year, as usual I looked out my window when I woke up but something seems to be amiss. Since the sun is not out yet I decided to do my usual before going downstairs for a closer inspection. Upon opening the front door .......... "Oh my gosh !!!" my whole front beautiful natural bush kind of fence was destroyed and it is a hit and run case.

Time to play CSI, got the camera out and started to look for evidence .......... it was very easy, the culprit left the broken pieces of the car registration number plate at the crime scene. All I had to do is just to piece them together, not much thinking required .... hehe!! If he had remove just a couple of pieces of the broken plate then it would be very difficult to make a identification. Armed with the registration number we made a police report and at the same time contacted our insurance agent.



Our insurance agent was quick to react and got the adjuster to check out the crime scene on the same day. As usual the adjuster was very noncommittal but great at making very stupid comments and suggestions. I guess that he had a personality issue with himself.

After a couple of days and no response from the guilty party, we decided to pay them a visit. We got the ownership details from the road transport department with the police report. The vehicle was registered to a company in Malacca thus making the whole scenario favourable for us to pursue the matter of settlement personally instead of just relying on the insurance company. Relying on insurance company will just minimise our losses and that is why they employed the services of loss adjuster. Doing it our self there is no need to suffer any monetary losses just some intangible losses like anxiety, time, security and energy required for ground rehabilitation.

Locating the company was easy and after given the run around by some people in the company we managed to catch their General Manager. After a brief introduction of our self and spelling out very clearly of our intention to the General Manager, we went home with the assurance that she'll come back to us with a decent proposal. From the discussion we also found out that the culprit lied to his employer about the how, where and when the accident occurred until the police called them up to investigate base our report.

The next day a group of them including their insurance provider and contractor came to asses the situation. My request is simple and I gave them a choice. The first choice is to put everything back as it and I don't care what kind of plants they were going to use but they must ensure that the plants must live ........ hehe!!! I think this is a bit impossible. The hedge fencing is more than twenty years old and I had spent thousands of man hours if not millions maintaining it. I was willing to compromise on the second choice, a simple brick wall of acceptable quality .............. a brick wall so that we can maintain our privacy. As for the insurance matter they will have to deal with their own insurance company, not mine. I will return whatever compensation amount from their insurer if any to them minus our expenses to serve justice. See I am a reasonable person just requesting for what was rightfully ours.

A couple of days passed after their visit and I have to push them for a commitment but was told that their contractor did not want to do the job so they did not have a figure to work with. I guess they must had insisted to their contractor on my first choice cause it sounded cheaper. I rejected their request for us to get our own contractor cause I believe there would be a lot of mistrust from every party. A few days passed since then and we have to constantly bug them before they brought another contractor to make a quote base on the second choice.

A few more days later and after many phone calls we finally got a commitment from them ............ thank god it is finally over :)