I say, stop even bothering to try. You're never going to win with the kind of person who rudely says that a touring strategy is only for "rule breakers" on one page, and then two pages later says, "well I'll do it now that I know about it."
There are always going to be interested, open-minded, curious lurkers who will get the GOOD info from a response. That's reason enough to keep on trying.
I will grant you that my skin has gotten thinner, and I'm letting more of my natural sarcasm show, of late, but I honestly do try to be helpful.
You might do as a couple other people do, and just get some stock responses, save them in a text file, and pull 'em out when needed. That way you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time, which allows feelings to show up and get all pesky.
I work in insurance, .... I tend to view things in writing as fixed or rules.
OK. I once accidentally let my car insurance lapse. I was desperate. I had been with Geico for years, and this was the first time I'd ever been late with a payment, let alone let it get something like 2 weeks lapsed. I was terrified.
By the rules as far as I knew them, I was out of luck. I was going to have to start over, at the beginning, and since I'd had a lapse I was going to be in deep trouble.
I was very upset with myself when I called to explain and beg, and they listened very kindly. They, after much hemming and hawing, let me pay a few payments right then and there (and I still have NO idea how I had that much available at that moment (probably b/c I'd forgotten to pay it, but it was more than just the one missed payment) b/c I had NO credit cards and NO savings at that time), and they reinstated me, and didn't punish me for having let it lapse.
So there are grey areas in insurance, too. Now it was likely a policy for the agent, a little-used happy thing that they could pull out for long-time, otherwise good customers.
But as that customer, I certainly didn't know that, and had NO idea that I would come away from that with the same insurance I'd had before it lapsed!
So you're in insurance, but unless that was the only time in the universe that that has happened, insurance companies DO seem to have "let's not tell the customers up front" exceptions like that, and all the customer has to do is ask (and have been a good customer) and pay a bit more at that moment.
Not so different, in a way, than Disney saying "gotta use it inside this timeframe" but having the ability to let people use them late. Except that Disney does it more often than insurance companies do.
