| This advice works in other scenarios where companies string you along hoping you will give up and disappear. Once my car was badly damaged by someone who ran a stop sign. It was clearly the other driver's fault. Her insurance was Allstate. They strung me along for more than a month "investigating" this obvious situation. My car was an older one that was worth about the cost of the repairs, and they probably thought I would just give it up. But it was my only transportation and I needed it for work. I did some research on California's insurance regulations and discovered their requirement that claims be settled within 40 days. After 40 days passed, I wrote a email similar to the letter examples in this article, giving then five days before I reported them to California's insurance department. It was astonishing to see the immediate change in their behavior. The adjustor who had been playing telephone tag for weeks called me within an hour and arranged for a body shop near my home to start work immediately. They laugh at angry bluster, but will move mountains to appease a focused person who can bring a regulatory agency down on them. |
For the peanut gallery: never give anyone in an extension in writing; your ask should be for immediate performance.
Why? Well, there are a lot of varieties of "performance" which aren't happy outcomes for you. Should you give someone an extension to their deadline and have them perform in a way which is displeasing to you, the default is they do not have a regulatory infraction if you complain [0]. Should someone blow their deadline and then perform and then have you complain to the regulator, they basically always have a regulatory infraction regardless of whether their performance is satisfactory, so their incentive is do whatever possible to prevent the complaint.
[0] Situation dependent, obviously, but lots of regulatory regimes will have an escape hatch like "unless agreed to by the customer" or "unless agreed to by the counterparty in writing."