A Black Cat. Friday the 13th And A Motor Claim

#personalinsurance #motorclaim #highnetworth #businessinsurance

 

This article was written by Tim Chadwick and published by News24 on 22 March 2026

 

Act One

The bang, when it came, was exactly the sort that rearranges a Friday. And your weekend.

I was on the M3, minding my business, on my way home from the salt mines on Friday afternoon. Then ahead. A constellation of red brake lights. Traffic came to a grinding halt thanks to council doing clearing work, the kind that asks nothing of you except patience and playing Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, very loud. Just as I was humming “if there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now”. Brakes. Tyre’s screeching. Burning rubber. Bang. I was alarmed. My moment of music heaven rudely interrupted. A nice little SUV arrived, uninvited, into my rear bumper with meaningful conviction. Stallion, my long suffering vehicle, accepted the blow in the way all dignified machines accept the indignity of being rear ended on a Friday afternoon. Which is to say, rather badly.

Out I jumped to meet the other human being (in insurance circles, unkindly, called the third party). She was young, apologetic and genuinely mortified, which I respected. A momentary lapse, she said. I believed her. Why wouldn’t I? We exchanged the pleasantries two civilized South Africans exchange when one has just introduced herself to the other via the medium of a collision and then I got to work. Photos of my damage. Photos of her damage. A photo of her registration number. Her ID number. Her physical address. Her phone numbers. Her email address. A photograph of her license disc. And the contact details of any witnesses. This particular misfortune was small enough for me to skip this step. Yours might not be.

And then, this being the part most people miss and immediately regret, I typed her cell number into my phone and called it. Yes, while she stood in front of me. She looked a little confused. Then bemused. I smiled. Nothing personal. Just ruling out the chancer. A Saffer species that has evolved to a sophistication that would impress David Attenborough. Your chancer gives you a number that belongs to a cousin, a deceased uncle or a pizza delivery app. Ducking and diving is a highly rated SA life skill. And you usually only discover this three days later when the claim process begins and a stranger from Pofadder answers. One call. Thirty seconds. The Zondo Commission took four years and the chancers are still out there.

We parted ways. I gave myself a quiet thumbs up for managing to be both thorough and civil, even though she had violated my Stallion and my Friday. But no victim am I. Just a man with a dented ego, bumper and a half played favourite song.

Then came the police station.

South African law requires you to report a vehicle accident within 24 hours. Not a strong suggestion. A legal requirement, with some exceptions like windscreens and potholes. The accident happened Friday afternoon.

In the wee hours of Saturday morning, I presented myself at my nearest station with low expectations and the quiet resolve of a man who knows exactly what he is walking into. This was not my first rodeo. I am after all in the accident (insurance) business.

Warrant Officer Moneypenny was behind her desk. A large desk. The kind that communicates institutional permanence and personal unavailability in equal proportion. She looked up, then down. I said I was there to report an accident.

“Where did it happen?” she said. “Constantia.” “You must go report there.”

Now. A lesser man, your standard issue papbroek, drives to Constantia. A lesser man, who is not in the accident business, does not know that in South Africa, you can report a road accident at any police station, not only the one nearest to the scene. This is not a loophole or a technicality. It is the law. I know this because, I unashamedly repeat, I am in the accident business, which on reflection, explains quite a lot about my Friday.

I said, politely, that I was entitled to report here.

She looked at me for a long time. I looked back. Hard. It kind of reminded me of a scene from Dirty Harry. In that pause lived the entire history of South African bureaucracy, the brief calculation of effort against accountability, the intense negotiation between the system and the privileged smarty pants individual who has done his reading. Eventually, I heard, okkkkkay. The four beautiful k’s that would melt anyone’s heart. Wap bam boogie.

Out came the Accident Report (AR) form. The AR form has been photostatted so many times it has lost the will to be legible. This is not a metaphor. The text was very faint, as if the document itself had looked at the workload ahead, the help and decided to go through the motions. Twenty minutes or so it took. She helped me fill it in, because I asked nicely and because she was, in fairness, on her best behaviour now. When it was done, I asked where I should sign.

“No,” she said. “I sign.”

And there it was. Without a signed and stamped acknowledgement, I had nothing tangible. No case number, means no claim approval, no claim means Stallion’s repair bill has my name on it. I needed proof. At that moment my thoughts became suicidal. Slowly gathering myself, I asked her, politely to sign and date an acknowledgement that I had been there, done the AR thing. And to stamp it.

She slowly and with the precision of Peanut (my black cat), judging one from a height one did not know they could reach, picked up the rubber stamp and brought it down with the conviction of a woman who had been waiting her whole life for this glorious moment. It was done.

As I walked to my car, I checked the stamp. 6 March. Today was 7 March? Oh boy. I turned around. I will not reproduce the full exchange that followed. What I will say is that Warrant Officer Moneypenny was not overjoyed to see me return and that the second stamp landing on the corrected document registered on the building’s structural integrity. I thanked her, like a good Catholic would and left. Lekka poegaai, but victorious. I had achieved the unachievable. And I felt jolly good.

 

The Second Act

But wait, there is more. This story has a second act. This is South Africa. Things always do.

I had read the night before that the eNaTIS online system allows you to report minor accidents digitally. No queues. No forms that have been photostatted into illegibility. Just a nice, clean process on your phone, at a reasonable hour. In I went.

Page one, smooth. Page two, encouraging. Page three, the progress bar moved steadily toward one hundred percent and for a brief, naïve moment I felt the particular optimism of a South African who has just discovered that a government digital system may actually work.

It stopped at 97%.

No error message. No explanation. Just the dreaded spinning wheel, patient, circular, philosophically indifferent to my plans. I tried three different browsers. I tried again and again. The wheel kept spinning, committed entirely to its rotation, going nowhere with outstanding consistency. Progress with no outcomes is as doomed as slaptjips without salt and vinegar. Like a contractor who pitches up, removes the tiles and then does not come back. You are left with a hole and optimism.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to.

It is highly unlikely the system is going to fix itself before your Friday gets rearranged. And the law of averages says it will.

Now you know what to expect when it does.

The events and characters of this prang are real. Warrant Officer Moneypenny will know who she is. Some poetic license was applied, lightly. The stamp was dated the wrong day. That part needed no embellishment.

 

Tim Chadwick is the CEO of Chadwicks. He advises businesses and individuals on risk and insurance. He also writes on the psychology of risk.

This is a work of fiction for educational purposes only. No permission is granted for AI training, scraping or use in model development. The characters, events and conclusions described are hypothetical and illustrative. This content is not professional insurance, financial or legal advice and should not be relied upon as such.