When I got deployed to Rhode Island, I’ll be honest — I was pumped. I haven’t been anywhere in a while, and it felt good to hit the road again. But before I left, everyone had the same warning: “Rhode Island’s tough on adjusters. Real combative up there. Good luck.” So naturally, I geared up for battle. I packed like I was going into a war zone — laptop, flashlight, extra pens, emotional armor. Four days in, and guess what? Everyone’s been perfectly nice. No yelling. No attitude. No slammed doors. I’m starting to think the only thing Rhode Island’s fighting is the concept of urgency. The only guy who was mad at me was because  I showed up at a quarter to 9. They’re on island time here — but not the tropical kind. No palm trees, no tiki torches, no fruity drinks. Just cold, gray mist, and Dunkin’ Donuts as far as the eye can see. The average body shop “opens” around 8 a.m. That’s what the sign says, anyway. But if you show up at 8, you’ll just see a dark garage and mayb...

Years ago, I was working in Suffern, New York, as a fresh-faced estimator at a body shop built inside an old firehouse. It was a weird, gritty place—charming in the way that asbestos and oil-stained floor drains can be. The owner was smart, successful, and yelled at me every single day. I think he thought that was “mentorship.” And maybe it was. Honestly, if he’d just slowed down long enough to explain why he was yelling, I probably could’ve learned a lot faster. But I picked it up anyway, mostly by absorbing stress like a shop towel. One of the strangest parts of the job was this: when a car was done, it was my responsibility to deliver it to the customer. That meant final inspection, collecting the deductible, answering questions, and making sure the car didn’t look like it had been parked in a haunted sawmill. The problem? We didn’t wash our own cars. Not because we didn’t want to, but because we couldn’t . I don’t remember if it was a village ordinance, a plumbing issue, or jus...

This past week I was neck-deep in training with my carrier—another step in the march toward being cut loose to handle claims on my own. I’ve been drinking from the firehose of policy language, claim scenarios, damage thresholds, and every “what if” known to the insurance galaxy. The topic of the week? Prior damage. Fraud. Claim settlement strategy. In other words, stuff that in theory should be new and eye-opening. But let’s be honest—I’ve been around this stuff since the first time someone said, “Hey man, while it’s in the shop for the door, can you just throw the bumper in too?” Some of the SIU (Special Investigations Unit) stuff was new in a formal sense—structured training, flowcharts, official triggers. But the actual fraud itself? Oh, that’s been there since forever. Like cave paintings of shady Neanderthals asking for free mammoth dent repairs. “Happy to Commit a Felony for You, Sir.” Back in my shop-running days, I used to joke with one of my estimators: “Why yes...

There’s a saying: when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I was ready. And Bernie Obry appeared—with a red pen, a calm demeanor, and an uncanny ability to turn damage estimates into life lessons. I met Bernie in Poughkeepsie, back when the shop was bursting at the seams with talent, sarcasm, and Olympic-level dysfunction. Bernie managed the GEICO account and oversaw the overall flow of the shop. I handled State Farm, a rotating cast of misfit insurance companies, and cash-paying customers who “knew a guy” and wanted to settle up in quarters. From the jump, I was told to run my estimates by Bernie before finalizing them. He didn’t just review them. He graded them—like a junior high English teacher burning through a stack of overdue Huckleberry Finn essays. Out came the red pen. Lines were slashed, totals adjusted, margins filled with comments like SEE ME AFTER CLASS. It was humbling. But it made me better. We were opposites. Bernie read GQ . I read invoices I dropped mu...

  Long before I had a driver’s license, I got my start in the auto body business the same way a lot of great stories start: by crashing something. I was a kid in a tiny upstate New York town—the kind of town where the bike squad was basically The Sandlot , if you subtracted the pool, Wendy Peffercorn, and added a lot more trespassing. There were maybe eight of us with bikes, and we rode everywhere: fishing rods strapped to handlebars, jumping off the roofs of abandoned school buses onto roofs of junk cars at the junkyard, and once even staging a full Royal Rumble using old mattresses stacked under a roof ledge. How any of us survived Gen X childhood is a miracle. One day I decided to bomb down a washed-out trail where a railroad trestle used to be. Abandoned tracks were everywhere back then, and this one had a big, eroded drop-off with ruts from dirt bikes. I wasn't trying to impress anybody—I was alone, just a kid entertaining himself in a world without Candy Crush or cell phon...