Willing to Pay the Price of Stupidity
Thought up:  8.27.03 - 6:13pm
Written: 8.28.03 - 4:02 pm
#18

For whatever reasons, these past 2 days I’ve been thinking of buying myself some life insurance.  Why?  I have no real logical reasoning behind it; except for the fact that in college, I had a friend that gave a speech in class about how easy it was to get a policy for super cheap at our age.  I remember him saying something about how we could get something astronomical at the time, like $100,000 policy for the “low-low price of just $1.00 a day.”  At the time, even a dollar was a lot!  I barely had enough to buy a case of beer 6 out of 7 days, let alone a life insurance policy!

I was in college, I was dirt poor, I had bloodshot eyes, hoping to someday be a big-name Science Rocketist.  Believe it or not, I didn’t follow through with those dreams.  All that talk in class about molecules, astrology, birth control pills, and the adverse effects of alcohol in the school place really confused me in my drunken state.  I mean, most of the time I had a hard time waking up for the class, let alone actually LEARNING something.  But four years later, degree in-hand, I was ready to face the world.  Little did I know that 3 years after that I’d be thinking about life insurance one fine day…
So I hop online to check out the best places to search for this “Goldmine of Life.”  A couple different sites pop up.  One of the first ones being “Chinese life insurance companies aim for listing overseas.”  I have no need for that I figure, but it’s a gold mine somewhere, whether it be in China or not, it’s LIFE insurance.  I’ve played the game of Life I tell you.  If you’ve never actually “played” the board game “Life,”  don’t read the next couple sentences, they’ll mean nothing to you…

START NOT READING HERE IF YOU’VE NEVER PLAYED ————– You can really start needing that life insurance when you’re playing that game.  I remember spinning that wheel and having it pop off and run into my car, as well as my opponent’s car, and knock all the kids out of the car.  Sure enough you’re gonna get sued and you’ll need that money to pay for your opponents when their kid goes to college…  Or the square “lose your job, lose a turn.”  That one was always a doozey.  My brother and I modified the game after 17 or 18 games in a row.  The new squares that we colored in with such winners as “have hammer smash your car,” “flush driver down toilet” and my personal favorite, “melt one of your passengers with lighter.”  Oh, the younger years…

RESUME READING HERE IF YOU’VE NEVER PLAYED OR IF YOU’VE PLAYED AND JUST FINISHED READING WHAT YOU JUST READ THAT I TOLD THE PEOPLE THAT HAVEN’T PLAYED TO NOT READ——————— So the Chinese life insurance place is a really poorly laid out site that takes like 15 minutes to load in the first place and I figure if it takes this long to load their page, there is no REAL reason to buy from them, because by the time I’m dead, all of my kids and their kids’ kids will have already died.  Not worth it, I’ll look elsewhere.

So I find this other site that has everything to do with life insurance, and each line reads about how you have to be a non-smoker to even apply for the insurance.  So I get on and start typing in my info, and they ask me whether I’m a smoker or not; naturally I think to myself, well, I have had a smoke before, and I suppose I have one here and there when I’m having a drink with friends, but I wouldn’t consider myself a “smoker” per se.  But then I second guess myself and I get to thinking, “what if my house burned down, but I was in the bathtub soaking myself with tree sap, as I so often do, having a smoke and didn’t hear or see the fire burning, got solidified in the sap with the cigarette in my mouth and the insurance didn’t pay out?”

Would it all really be worth it then?  Because you know the insurance company is gonna try to pin about anything they can on you to not pay your beneficiaries.  That’s just what they do.  So if I click “non-smoker” I can never ever have a smoke again in my life.  I don’t think it’s worth it, so I click “Yes, I am a smoker.”
The next question asks what kind of coverage do I want?  I have no idea!  I’ve only been researching for a day, how about we just stick with the status quo, $15,000,000.  Check and click, and it’s on the way to processing.  Well, as it turns out they bust out a table that tells me I’m gonna need to pay almost $6,000.00 a MONTH to cover that kind of policy.  No thanks; it must be the smoking bit.  So I go back and change the checkbox where I claim to be a smoker and it shoots the premium down to something THEY must think is more manageable, $1,293.39.  Now how in the hell do they expect me to come up with that kind of money in the first place?  Yea, hello, I’m well worth $15,000,000.00, but not for the price of $1,293.39.  No way!

Upon further review, I didn’t know whom I would give the $15,000,000.00 to if I won in the first place, so I decided to get a little more logical and drop the price down to a $1,000,000.00 policy.  First as a smoker, $335.38.  No.  And then as a non-smoker, $67.19.  Now we’re getting in to the realm at which I’m willing to deal.  So I check the non-smoking box vowing to never pick up a cancer-stick ever again after signing up for this, and I click the “Next” button.  Well, the “Next” button sends me to this page of questions about my personal life.  Now I’d say that, for the most part, I’m a daring guy.  I like to do things a little bit “by the seat of my pants.”  And that’s why this page is freaking me out.  This page has a bunch of questions you’re supposed to check the box in if you’ve ever done or plan on doing ANY of the following:

1.    Are you into skydiving?
2.    Do you like parasailing?
3.    Speedboats?
4.    Drag race?
5.    Scuba dive?
6.    Hang glide?
7.    Ride in an airplane in any other capacity other than a passenger?  (What the hell does this mean?)

Me:  “Hello, I’m here to apply for some life insurance.”
Insurance buddy:  “Alright Sir, before we get started, let’s see…  …What do you do for a living?”
Me:  “I’m a pilot!”
Insurance buddy:  “Beat it!  We don’t allow your kind around here…”

8.    Work in a mine?
9.    Engage in high-risk activity?

Now what the hell are these all about?   These are just a couple of the asinine choices that I remember out there on the list.  I’m sure that they could add:

1.    Do you like to play with guns?
2.    Do you like to eat poison?
3.    Have you ever wanted or currently enjoy swimming while really really drunk?
4.    Have you ever tried to see how far you could stick a nail in your nose?
5.    Do you think your car can fly off cliffs?
6.    Do you have a fetish for women/men with STD’s?
7.    Do you believe in witchcraft?
8.    Do you take stupid bets that involve life-threatening circumstances?
9.    Flame-throwers in your ass?
10.    Have you ever, or will you ever want to strap bombs to yourself and blow up?
11.    Do you starve and beat your dog and pass out near him ever?
12.    Would you ever think about fighting a real-life ninja that has throwing stars, and all you have is a limp soggy noodle, 4 corndogs, 2 napkins, no clothes, blind-folded in a labyrinth?

I mean, who, HONESTLY is going to check ANY of those?  I SAW what happened when I checked that I smoke!  You bet your sweet ass I’m not gonna check any of those!  Yea, I’ve done most of them, but I don’t want to pay $10,000.00 a month to insure myself.  I finally decided after 10 minutes of HARD searching that I had no real reason to insure myself.  I don’t have any beneficiaries yet anyway.  It was a valiant effort, but what it boils down to is that if your life sucks, get life insurance…

What is this disease you ask? Read on! Thank goodness I’ll never suffer from this since I’m only than when they say it happens… Whew! (click to enlarge):

and need to spy on hotter people… Nothing wrong with that…

It has been awhile, but Mr. Fro is back.  My office has blocked the Buttertub; it is either because there are too many YouTube videos or because I spend too much time on the site.  I am such a good worker it must be because of the YouTube vidoes.  Anyway, there is a strange video below.  There wasn’t a whole lot of effort that went into this post (maybe it is because I spend too much time on the internet), just showing the first video interesting video I could find on YouTube.  Enjoy!