The Worst Jobs For Us & Other Musings: A Friday Chat
What Would Be The Worst Jobs For Us, And Other Musings: A Friday Chat
NICOLE: Hello! Happy Friday!
ESTER: Indeed. I see that you are now prepared for anything: you have an Earthquake Kit and a fridge full of produce.
N: I am not, however, prepared to be national-news pranked by my offspring. I just read the update to your Winning Powerball Ticket story and I am APPALLED. Also, I want to know exactly how the son convinced his mother that she was a winner.
E: I don’t know, but I doubt he expected to prank an entire nation and I hope he is appropriately remorseful?
N: Grounded for life.
E: And disinherited. Obviously. Not that I imagine there’ll be much to inherit now. Just one more reason not to burn bridges after you think you’ve won! Have the actual and final winners been identified yet?
N: I’m looking at an article that says none of the winners have come forward, but this is the type of news that changes quickly enough that this information might be outdated by the time I finish typing this sentence.
E: We don’t even know for sure that none of the winners is Mike, since he know he got a ticket and that his dream was to win, like, a million dollars and then ghost.
My lottery dream scenario would be to match most but not all the numbers and quietly win a million without anyone noticing.
All he told me after the numbers were announced was, “I didn’t lose money.” That could mean anything.
N: I did not win. Unless you count “the only winning move is not to play.” On the other hand, I did take a kind of reverse gamble with my Extreme Survival Kit. The odds are greater that I’ll end up wearing my backpack on the earthquake-devastated streets of Seattle than winning the lottery, aren’t they.
E: I would definitely bet on you to survive, or even thrive during, an apocalyptic event. If one could gamble on such things. And is it that different, really, than my buying life insurance? I’m paying $30 a month for something my family may never need, but in the meanwhile, it supposedly gives us all more of a sense of safety. Financial Disaster Preparedness.
N: I suppose. But someone gets your life insurance payout in the end regardless, right? You can always designate a beneficiary even if you outlive your family’s immediate need for the insurance. Or am I misunderstanding how life insurance works?
E: Yeah, it’s not a guarantee. If everyone got a payout regardless of whether they died, Life Insurance wouldn’t be a profitable bet for the insurance companies. As I understand it, if I die in the next 18 years, my heirs get $850,000. If I turn out okay, though, I will have, by some lights, “wasted” a large amount of money. Here’s a quick explainer:
Term life insurance is known as “pure” life insurance, because it will pay out the death benefit if the named person dies within the defined term (anywhere from one to 30 years), but if the named person does not die, no portion of the premiums will be returned to the policyholder.
N: Oh, sure, I forgot about the expiration date part. (Pun intended.) I was thinking that the last time I had life insurance, the beneficiary was my sister, so … I knew it didn’t have to be partners/children.
E: You’ve had it before, but you don’t have it now?
N: It came as a benefit in one of my jobs, IIRC. I do not have life insurance now because nobody stands to lose anything financially if I die unexpectedly. I suppose that someone could email me and remind me that life insurance can cover the cost of a funeral.
E: Yeah, but if your family’s not going to go broke paying for a funeral, why bother? That doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to me.
N: I should also like to state for the record: CHEAPEST FUNERAL POSSIBLE PLEASE. If I die unexpectedly, do not go all out on caskets and gaskets. But remember: I might not actually be dead. I might be wandering the streets with my sleeping bag and my calorie bars. Anything could happen.
E: So true. It could be that your child is just pranking us by making us think you’re dead. I’m with you, though: please do not spend anything on my funeral. I really seriously honestly do not care about what kind of send-off I get. Pine box me, or even USPS-box me. Whatever.
If I do die unexpectedly in the next 18 years, though, please make a big deal about how far-sighted and generous I was to get that term life insurance policy. Lavish me with praise.
N: The entire eulogy will be an advertisement for term life insurance. Also, I look forward to the trend piece on how Millennials are once again disappointing the older generation by not wanting good-enough funerals.
E: I’d say we’re advocating for “good enough” funerals! A pine box is like the definition of “good enough.” But this is a morbid start to the year, even if it has been a morbid year so far (RIP Alan Rickman, you voice of the ages). Let’s talk about something more cheerful in our last minutes.
N: I have an enormous pile of food! That’s cheerful. What’s cheerful in your life this Friday?
E: Cheerful and exciting, yes! I have ingredients for a one-skillet veggie chili that I’m going to turn into a meal, using some red peppers that are not quite too wrinkled yet. Also, Babygirl was as sick as a really woebegone dog this week, but she managed to make it back to school for at least a half-day today and I am very grateful that things both have gotten better and weren’t worse.
N: I am grateful for that on your behalf! After all, if she were sick, she wouldn’t be able to take Uber.
E: Wow, we are really working in references to everything, aren’t we? Let’s also be grateful we aren’t retail workers at a place like The Gap that switches our schedules around at the last minute and leaves us unable to make plans. And that we never got (in)famous for broadcasting the wrong Powerball numbers on live TV.
N: I am always terrified about something like that when I type people’s names or type out numbers. What if it looks right but it’s actually wrong? (And then sometimes it is wrong, and we just edit the piece to make it right. Because this isn’t live TV, thank goodness.)
E: Working for live TV would turn me into a nervous wreck. I’d never stop shaking. Probably it’s one of the Worst Jobs For Me. Another: middle-school math teacher. Those children would eat me alive and then play games with my bones.
N: For me it’s flight attendant. You couldn’t pay me enough. Probably pilot too, because I am bad enough at driving a car that you don’t want to see me try to drive a plane.
E: You’d look jaunty in the uniform though!
N: But my eyes would have that constant “I am going to die and I haven’t purchased term life insurance!!!” look.
E: Still: jaunty.
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