Monday, June 11, 2007

Mysterious Disappearance

I started to write yesterday---a teaser about today, the ten-year anniversary of the day my mom died, "I was sitting in a cubicle in Bingham Farms, Mich. when I learned about it." Adjusting insurance claims, helping everyday people recoup from the many bad things that can happen to property. Fire, flood, theft, wind, and lesser-expected events (e.g., hundreds of gallons of fuel oil mistakenly pumped into the wrong house, the wrong basement, a basement without a fuel tank while you are away on vacation, taking in Disney Land while the fuel oil seeped into your back yard, under the garage and the in-ground pool, and filled the house with greasy fumes that spread throughout the place, chemically bonding to the surfaces of your walls and things).

Some days the job sucked.

My dad used to tell me (and, as he is inclined to do, re-told me a time or two since) that you can see into a job by looking at the 50-year-olds who have been doing it since they were young. How does a job wear on them? Are they spry, lively, enthusiastic (or, at the very least, expert and well-paid), or might they, on the other hand, pass for the walking dead? Many of the 50-year-olds handling insurance claims, other than the few who gave orders and managed the profitability of the outfit, were taking leave for heart operations. Their arteries were constricted from all of the stress (travel, emergencies, desperate insureds), the unending grind of humans and their property against elements, accidents.

I was sitting in a cubicle....

When that awful call came telling me she hadn't awoken from her sleep on the 10th, I was stupefied--crushed under those waves of confusion, pain, and intense disbelief. This hardly needs repeating. She was 48 years-old. And the cause, as I've written before, was never settled. Perpetually unsettled, you could say. And, at my desk just then, I felt a rush (among rushes) to act--to tell others, to pack, to drive, and so on. But the phone rang again--before I'd done anything--and I picked it up (in a moment when the world was so completely caved in, it couldn't have been about anything else).

Someone called about an insurance claim! Checking on its status. The scenario: a tractor trailer was parked outside a suburban Detroit warehouse. Its contents, something like 880 cases of Smirnoff Vodka. When it arrived at the next destination, the cargo was gone. Something like $150,000 worth of vodka evaporated into thin air. The policy for the warehouse covered mysterious disappearance. As was customary for claims involving property, I visited the warehouse some weeks earlier, verified that in fact that vodka was not there. Most of the warehouse bays were stacked high with pallets of unmounted engines from the Ford Motor Company. The vodka had mysteriously disappeared. This photo of the warehouse from the day I visited proves it.

The vodka's missing. I'm not sure why I hold onto the photo. I gave the insurance biz 30-days notice and split from Detroit for Kansas City, leaving town before this claim was settled. I'm sure there was more to it--interviewing the driver of the rig, tracing the vodka's manufacturing and shipping record before the goods arrived at the warehouse, even calculating the depreciation (is it appreciation?) of the booze. Anyway, I doubt the liquor has been located after all these years.

Posted by Derek Mueller at June 11, 2007 1:10 PM to Under a Bushel