Martin’s cubicle was near the kitchen, where he put his lunch in the fridge Tuesday morning and poured himself a coffee. He sat at his desk and turned on his computer. The mystical alignment of the office supplies had been disturbed by the cleaning staff, so he moved the stapler back into its place as anchor to the holy trinity of stapler, calculator, pen holder. He tore yesterday’s page off his daily vocabulary-builder calendar to reveal the word of the day:
Recondite - (reh’kondeit) a. Secret, hidden, or unknown... removed from ordinary understanding or knowledge, deep or profound.
“Deep or profound. Merlin’s secret scrolls were considered to be quite... recondite. Merlin’s recondite scrolls of magic.”
“What’s that you’re mumbling, Marty?”
“Word of the day, Dave.”
“Okay, just as long as I know you’re not going bug-eyed crazy and muttering and drooling over there.”
“Not so far. Check with me after lunch.”
“I tell you, Marty. It’s just a matter of time for us all.” Dave was a ‘glass is half empty’ kind of guy, who would also take pains to point out that there were smudges all over the glass and a lipstick stain and wasn’t this a crack in the side and where did they get this water, anyway, a swamp? Dave's hair was lazy, not conforming to any shape or style. A borderline scowl and his curly, wind-scattered bed head look were always complemented with clothes that just skirted the limits of the company dress code: a turtleneck sweater technically is “a shirt with a collar” and hiking boots are not sneakers per se. His expression was one of perpetual disillusionment, as if he were hearing the last part of a carney's sales pitch and was itching to walk away.
The day’s quotes lay stacked in his IN box and he surveyed them thoughtfully, making a few notes, setting a few aside to decline, and then putting the rest in a pile for the underwriting checks. He then read his e-mail, which was just the usual internal memos and broker correspondence and a joke about two sailors and a pissing contest. He pulled a folder down from his pile of renewals and set to it. Had a second coffee and began to come to life. Quoted a few, took a few phone calls, did the suck-up thing with the brokers. The majority of the insurance business in Canada was written through brokers and many companies wrote their business exclusively through them. It was like having a sales force that was entirely independent and could choose to sell any customer on your particular coverage or go to any of your competitors instead. So keeping brokers happy was a daily challenge.
Dave came around the corner of Martin’s cube just before lunch. “Unbelievable. I just told George Simpson that I wasn’t renewing that shit hole of a repair garage, and he said he’d ‘pull the whole goddamn book’ if we didn’t do it.”
“No way!” said Darlene, coming around from the other side of Martin’s cubicle.
“Oh, yeah. Second time in a month he’s threatened me with that shit. Well, you know Gerry’s going to approve it now. And the whole place is going to burn to the ground tomorrow, I guarantee it.”
“Why don’t we call his bluff?” said Martin. “He’ll just keep pulling that trick until we do.”
Dave shook his head sadly. “No, no, Martin. Now you know this is a growth year, and head office is on us to write more business, not chase it away.”
“There must be something in the water out there in broker-land. I just had a producer ask me if it was okay to put an airport on ‘some kind of package,’” said Darlene. “Hello? Is anybody home?”
“At least that’s just stupidity and not some fucking broker power play making us do something for the wrong reason,” said Dave. His scowl was working overtime.
“I don’t know sometimes,” said Darlene, crossing her arms and pulling the material tight across her chest, which caused the material in Martin’s pants to pull tight across his crotch. He picked up his file folder and opened it across his lap as he pretended to listen to what Darlene was saying while concentrating on not looking at her breasts. “Okay, the vast majority of brokers we deal with are honest, professional, and a pleasure to work with, but there’s always a few sleazoids.”
Darlene was very attractive. She had raven black hair with big boobs and she was taller than Martin with a lot of confidence and sass. Tells it like it is. Shooting the shit with her like this, in easy camaraderie, he was made acutely aware of his single guy status. This gave him a feeling like indigestion that was way down low in his stomach. It was an ache of some kind. The idea of converting this friendly interaction with a woman into something deeper was right there in front of him every day. It seemed so easy at times, but he knew how complicated it became. And she had a boyfriend anyway.
“This is the kind of day which reminds us that Franz Kafka was a commercial underwriter,” offered Martin. “All hail the patron saint of Underwriting!”
“Sure, Martin,” said Dave. “Whatever.”
Darlene laughed and returned to her desk.
Martin often marveled at the Kafkaesque qualities to his job. The people who needed their product the most, people with a high exposure to loss by fire, theft, or liability, were the ones they did not want to sell it to. His job was to prevent these kinds of people from buying the product, and trying only to sell it to people who didn’t need it as much, people with a low exposure to loss. He often thought of Kafka, the perpetual insomniac, madly scribbling long into the night, imagining himself as a huge bug, a man on trial, a prisoner in a penal colony. What more proof of the pressures of the job was needed? You just had to read the stories to know how he felt, and Martin did both.
Insurance companies don’t actually make much money from underwriting risk. The market was perpetually “soft,” or hyper-competitive because of a battle for market share, and the rates weren’t always adequate for the kind of losses they had to pay out. The real profit came from investment income. The companies would collect premiums from all the people and businesses they insured and have to hold onto it in case they had to pay out in future in the form of claims. Because of the lag time between when premiums were collected and when losses were paid, large sums of money were held in “reserve,” just in case. These funds were invested, of course, and whatever returns they made went to the bottom line of the company. It was an investors dream: making money off other people’s money.
Martin noticed a thick fax had come in from the Loss Control Department at Head Office. Ultimate Diecasting, the cover reported. That was fast! Less than a week and here it was. Good to see that “RUSH!” actually corresponded to a notion for these people that they should hurry. He flipped to the back to look at the picture: a pretty standard non-combustible industrial plaza. He checked the protection, and confirmed that it had a monitored alarm system, steel bars on the doors and windows and they had sprinklers. No obvious deficiencies that he could see. Yet.
The narrative section was less clear cut. It described a standard machine shop set-up, with CNC machines for cutting patterns described by a computer, lathes, drill-presses, and a quality control department. Fair enough, but what were they making? The description of products was vague, something about flange rings and some metal casings with an “industrial” application. Application to what? The rep noted in the file that the insured was “cagey” about products and “intensely private” about their customers. U.S. Sales: 75%. Customer(s): confidential. Reading between the lines, Martin could tell he wasn’t getting the whole story.
He phoned over to head office to speak to the rep.
“Hi, Walt. It’s Martin Porchnik over at Metro. I got your report on Ultimate Diecasting. Thanks for the quick response.”
“No problem. I was out that way on another call yesterday, and I dropped by without an appointment. You get a better picture of the normal day-to-day stuff if you don’t give them a chance to clean up.”
“Sounds like they weren’t very forthcoming with information.”
“Are you kidding? Just call me a dentist.”
Martin laughed because it was expected. “It says here his U.S. customers are ‘confidential’. He didn’t give you any further explanation of that?”
“No, he showed me the door at that point. I was practically thrown out of the joint, so I got the picture that they were pretty touchy about their customers. You could order an audit of the books if you wanted. It’s your right under the statutory conditions, which I sure don’t want to be the one to tell him.”
“The premium on this thing is only $5000. Gerry would never approve it.”
“Well, that’s all you’re going to get, then. I’m telling you, Marty, it’s like water from a stone.”
“Okay, thanks, Walt.”
He allowed himself a kind of humph noise of frustration as he hung up the phone. Only one more option. He took it in to Gerry.
“Here’s that machine shop that Jed Johansen sent in,” he said without preamble, barely knocking on her door frame. “The one with the new loss.”
She looked up. “Oh, yeah. That was fast. Let’s have a look.” He handed her the report and then sat in the chair opposite her desk. She skimmed the report, nodded at the blurry, faxed photographs, and then looked up at him. “Looks fine. So, it was bad luck. Not worth worrying about it.”
“I’m still worried. They’re not telling us what they’re making there. We have virtually no information about products liability. We don’t know what they make, and we don’t know who their customers are. Walt told me he was practically thrown out of there when he pushed him about his customers.”
“So send a note to the broker. I’m sure it’s something boring, just like it sounds. ‘Flange rings and casings.’ Don’t worry so much.”
“You pay me to worry.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, go and do it somewhere else. Kidding! But really, if you could.”
Back to the cube. He was already composing the memo in his mind. “Please confirm the following: Who are the insured’s major clients? For what end products does the insured produce parts? Who provides the designs for these parts and who checks them prior to use?” He could also see himself waiting until quarter past hell freezing over to hear from the broker. This was a Johansen, after all. Oh well, he sighed. He’d just have to push a little. But for now, it was lunchtime.
Holly from Claims was in the lunch room when he went in to get his sandwich from the fridge. She said hello in a distracted way and he sat down at an empty chair across from her. Holly was slim and a little shorter than average with light brown, no-work short hair. She looked serious and intelligent and sort of forbidding. She was really pretty when she smiled. It hadn't been easy to get to know her, but Martin was persistently friendly and she was often in the lunchroom when he was. She was wearing a professional woman’s suit in brown where the jacket only goes down to her hips and a whitish shirt collar pokes out the top but with no tie. They chatted a bit over sandwiches as they often did and then Holly excused herself and said she had to get back to her desk.