2022, Business, Family, Health, Kids, Uncategorized

Irony

36 Comments

I was quite amused yesterday on my way to work to see our insurance agent presumably driving to his office. He was riding a motorcycle. HE WASN’T WEARING A HELMET!

It seems to me that being an insurance agent means you exemplify caution and careful living. I remember the conversation we had together with our son when he got his driver’s license, and our agent told him to never hesitate to phone him any time, night or day, if he had been drinking and needed a ride home. Well, I wonder what he says to young motorcycle drivers he insures about helmets?

Our agent goes to our church and has a lovely tenor voice and sings with us in the choir. I can hardly wait to tease him about this.

What do you like to tease people about? What irony have you noticed this week? Any stories about insurance agents or companies?

36 thoughts on “Irony”

      1. I am quite done. I spent the last two months getting all of my programs wrapped up and turned over to other people and finishing up the programs that were on my desk. Turned in my computer yesterday afternoon, had a great party and last night I deleted my work apps off of my phone. I told people they could call me but not to send me any Excel spreadsheets to fix!!

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    2. So far so good. Enjoying some of my birthday freebies and picking up and straightening a bit. A gorgeous day. And tonight YA and I are going to see Wicked downtown.

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  2. Interesting, my first response is I don’t think I like to tease anyone. But on thinking a bit more, I can hearing myself pointing out some foible or contradiction in someone’s behavior, perhaps showing how I’m right…Hopefully I’ll remember something specific today.
    Husband has stories of teasing his (six) sisters… he’d walk past one of them and just take the doll or whatever, listen to them howl… I’m sure I did my fair share with my younger sister.

    Insurance salesmen show up in movies as rather bland characters – I remember at the end of American Graffiti, with the credits rolling they told what became of the kids – the Ron Howard character became an insurance salesman.

    Thinking…

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  3. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I don’t have any good insurance stories—I am not sure there are any. What a boring concept. I do have a great teasing story, though. Years ago, when my son and my nephew were 11 or 12 years old they loved to tease their 3 younger cousins who were collecting Beanie Babies with a passion. We had a family wedding in East Central South Dakota, to which the family trekked with visits to my mom’s house and my aunt’s house on the way. In the day or two following the wedding we stayed at my mom’s house. I noticed the boys seemed to be plotting something, but I could not figure out what it was. Early the next morning we awoke to shrieking girls. In the night the boys “kidnapped” the Beanie Babies. We got up to discoverBeanie Babies dangling by the necks from all the doorways, just out of reach of the girls. They claimed to be traumatized, but it seemed to spark acts of revenge and more teasing. It was pretty funny.

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  4. And I presume we’re talking about this irony definition: “the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect”
    or
    “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result”
    rather than the literary technique used in Greek tragedy.

    I love irony in naming things, like a friend’s cat named Solid, who was the slowest, most clueless animal I’ve ever met…a real sweetheart, though.

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  5. Conrad, our neighbor across the street, likes to ask questions mostly designed to show off his intellectual prowess. Many years ago, he was laid off from Sperry Univac after many years of employment with them. At the time, Minnesota had some program in place that offered displaced workers over a certain age access to college classes at no cost. Conrad qualified for the program and promptly enrolled at Metro State pursuing a degree in who knows what? He and his wife, Chris, had married straight out of high school, and in quick succession had three kids, so neither of them had any further schooling.

    I have no doubt that he was a motivated and diligent student. One afternoon he was writing a paper for one his classes and called me with the following query: “I’m looking for a word that means the opposite of what it says. It starts with an “r”, do you have any ideas?” After some back and forth and some probing questions from me, I suggested “irony.” “That’s it,” he said, “thanks” and hung up. Ever since then, whenever I think of irony I think of Conrad.

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  7. Speaking of “insurance”, what about all those scam calls, mostly originating in some podunk town, offering extended car warranties? Why don’t those qualify as fraud and aren’t they prosecuted as such?

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  8. I have an insurance man story.
    I don’t like people trying hard to sell me stuff. And it seems to me, some of the insurance people I’ve met have been extra pushy. I’ve met a couple really nice insurance people! But the pushy ones outweigh the nice ones.

    Here’s a story I’m sure I’ve told before. (But it’s one of my favorites)
    Farm Bureau is a farmers PAC, but they tend to lean a bit to the right. My dad was big on FB, me, not so much. I used to buy a lot of seed corn from FB because the salesman was a neighbor and he wasn’t pushy. We had FB car insurance but I cancelled it after they screwed up something for the umpteenth time.
    When the friendly neighbor retired from selling corn, a new guy came in. He came to the farm and really was only interested in selling me insurance and not so much corn. I told him I wasn’t interested in insurance. But he persisted! I told him again, No. Seems like he tried a third time.
    The next week I got a post card from him about trying their insurance. I called him up, smoke coming out of my ears, eyes bugged out…I’m sure there was spittle too. At least I didn’t hear from him again.

    I met a woman working for Lutheran Brotherhood who was on the American Bobsled team. I thought that was pretty cool.

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  9. I have an insurance man story.
    I don’t like people trying hard to sell me stuff. And it seems to me, some of the insurance people I’ve met have been extra pushy. I’ve met a couple really nice insurance people! But the pushy ones outweigh the nice ones.

    Here’s a story I’m sure I’ve told before. (But it’s one of my favorites)
    Farm Bureau is a farmers PAC, but they tend to lean a bit to the right. My dad was big on FB, me, not so much. I used to buy a lot of seed corn from FB because the salesman was a neighbor and he wasn’t pushy. We had FB car insurance but I cancelled it after they screwed up something for the umpteenth time.
    When the friendly neighbor retired from selling corn, a new guy came in. He came to the farm and really was only interested in selling me insurance and not so much corn. I told him I wasn’t interested in insurance. But he persisted! I told him again, No. Seems like he tried a third time.
    The next week I got a post card from him about trying their insurance. I called him up, smoke coming out of my ears, eyes bugged out…I’m sure there was spittle too. At least I didn’t hear from him again.

    I met a woman working for Lutheran Brotherhood who was on the American Bobsled team. I thought that was pretty cool.

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  10. Office computer and it doesn’t like me.

    I have an insurance man story.
    I don’t like people trying hard to sell me stuff. And it seems to me, some of the insurance people I’ve met have been extra pushy. I’ve met a couple really nice insurance people! But the pushy ones outweigh the nice ones.

    Here’s a story I’m sure I’ve told before. (But it’s one of my favorites)
    Farm Bureau is a farmers PAC, but they tend to lean a bit to the right. My dad was big on FB, me, not so much. I used to buy a lot of seed corn from FB because the salesman was a neighbor and he wasn’t pushy. We had FB car insurance but I cancelled it after they screwed up something for the umpteenth time.
    When the friendly neighbor retired from selling corn, a new guy came in. He came to the farm and really was only interested in selling me insurance and not so much corn. I told him I wasn’t interested in insurance. But he persisted! I told him again, No. Seems like he tried a third time.
    The next week I got a post card from him about trying their insurance. I called him up, smoke coming out of my ears, eyes bugged out…I’m sure there was spittle too. At least I didn’t hear from him again.

    I met a woman working for Lutheran Brotherhood who was on the American Bobsled team. I thought that was pretty cool.

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    1. When I worked in advertising, Lutheran Brotherhood was one of my clients. I traveled to Gettysburg, PA and Indianapolis to film commercials for LB and also designed and produced numerous print ads. At the time, Lutheran Brotherhood was, of course, a fraternal organization and offered insurance only to Lutherans which afforded the company some advantages over regular insurance companies but the supposed exclusivity always struck me a little funny so I devised a mock television commercial that had a would-be customer exclaiming that, “gee, your insurance looks swell but I’m not a Lutheran. What do I have to do to become a Lutheran?” The announcer then explains, “Lots of people aren’t Lutherans yet. That’s why we’re offering Luthomatic—for free! With Luthomatic you get everything you need to become a Lutheran—the disguises, the secret handshakes, everything! And once you’re a Lutheran, you’ll be eligible to buy our insurance!

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      2. I remember now. As a fraternal benefit society, Lutheran Brotherhood could be a non-profit and tax exempt. But they had to devise certain service projects, etc. to maintain their non-profit status while they pretended that insurance was just a sideline benefit for members. Now that they’ve become Thrivent, I wonder if they’re no longer non-profit?

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  11. OT drove through a brand new, still building neighborhood.

    Great big boxes, on the prairie,
    All made of the same color vinyl,
    All look exactly the same.
    In front of the the three car garages,
    Big vans or SUV’s made of fiberglass,
    All look about the same.
    See no children
    All inside watching screens, big and little,
    Their brains becoming ticky-tacky,
    All are just the same.

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  12. Because I spend all my afternoons with Sandra, I have switched I think all my business to my cell phone. Now Verizon says at the end of the year that the base cell phone that serves as my land line will not be useable. I can call a number and they will help me. I am sure they would sell me another cell phone and number. My landline is almost all scams. Every so often I get a real call from friends who did not make the change I told them to and probably still didn’t. Now and then a part of Mankato Clinic digs out that number somehow even though it was supposedly erased. I will cancel it soon. Then what will the scammers do? Not that I don’t get a few on my cell phone.

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    1. My cell phone became obsolete because of the obsolence of the 3G network. They gave me a free new cell phone. I liked my old one, because it had a tiny keyboard. The new one is pretty nice, though, and I can speak into it instead of typing, which is nice.

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