I drove with confidence. I paid no mind to my car since I regularly took it for maintenance, it passed the smog check, and everything was up to date. My insurance was on auto-pay, and I was never stopped by the police.
One day, I checked my bank account, casually calculating my expenses. I noticed something strange. Something was missing. I looked for the charges from my car insurance, which I had set to autopay more than a year before. But no charges were present. I knew how much it cost; I assumed it must have been under one of those weirdly named transactions. But try as I might, I couldn't find it.
I looked through my email to find the last interaction I had with them. The last email thanking me for charging my card was more than a year old. I ran to my car, grabbed a copy of my car insurance card, and called the number on the back. The number rang and rang, and went to a voicemail. It didn't sound like a corporate number.
I went to their website. The website gave me a Microsoft IIS server "404 Not Found" page. I googled their name to no avail. But then, I found an old email from them. A farewell email. It stated that they were going out of business and provided the phone number of an alternative company.
My stomach dropped. The realization hit me like a bucket of ice water—I had been driving for a year completely uninsured. Every trip to the grocery store, every commute to work, every weekend drive to visit family—all of it had been one police stop away from disaster. What if I had gotten into an accident? What if someone had been hurt? The financial implications alone made me dizzy.
That night, I barely slept. First thing in the morning, I called the alternative company to get coverage, but I still needed to drive to work that day. I got into my car, now seeing it not as my trusty vehicle but as a liability on wheels. The wheel felt stiff under my sweaty palms. The gas pedal seemed to have two or three extra coils that made it hard to press with my suddenly leaden foot. All of a sudden, all the cars next to me were police cars. Was that siren in the distance coming for me? Did that officer look at me a little too long at the stoplight?
Ignorance was truly bliss. But setting my account to paperless and auto-pay is something I avoid to this day. I'm not saving the forest by going paperless. I'll provide my own chunk of wood if need be. But I'd like to receive my correspondence by mail and set an alert to pay my bills on time. It's a little effort, but the reward is, I don't take the risk of driving a full year without insurance.