Why It Takes Me Forever to Write a Damn Chapter

The chasm between selling personal insurance to the immiserated middle class in Pennsylvania and selling through institutions like Goldman isn’t just vast. It’s geological, tectonic, apocalyptic. Wall Street’s blood-slick towers rise on the back of Main Street’s decomposing hopes, and I’m the middleman scraping teeth from the wreckage. My double Ivy alum boyfriend conducts complex research on G10 currencies for institutions. Me? I’m stuck here, cold-calling America’s bottom tier: slack-jawed hicks with fetal alcohol voices, and single moms from Philly named Lashawna who can’t replace the battery in their chirping smoke detector. I hear your smoke detector Lashawna. Fix your fucking smoke detector lady.

Every day I stare into my CRM, the pulsating digital anus of “Leads.” It gapes wide, dribbling out the same sewer stream of human detritus. Each lead is a nugget of shit, and I’m sifting through the waste for kernels of corn-premium, dialing and dialing, the same boilerplate script sliding off my tongue, vomit reheated. I’m a Pauline collector of pocket-change commissions, hawking barebones coverage to people who shouldn’t be allowed behind a wheel or near a phone line. And these idiots? They don’t really even understand how insurance works. They think it’s a lottery ticket or a gift from Jesus. I’m explaining comprehensive coverage to a man who can’t spell “car” let alone the word “deductible.”

“Why did my rate go up?” they ask, their voices feathered with disbelief. “Why is Company X cheaper than Company Y?” they ask again, as children who’ve just discovered there’s no Santa. There are reasons. Many. A long parade of them, marching in step. First of all, yes, our rates are high. But that’s because you’re currently swaddled in the arms of a subsidiary with underwriting stricter than a nun at confession. Your rate is low not because you’re special, but because they’re desperate. They haven’t staffed a proper risk department since their inception. So the moment you so much as blink funny, they’ll cancel you faster than you can say “Kanye at the VMAs.” That’s also why your claims process was a hot, bureaucratic mess. You’re not a client. You’re a number in a system that’s just trying to stay solvent. Now, let’s talk about your little contribution to the actuarial apocalypse: Isaiah. Nineteen. Drives a Dodge Charger, a car made for men in dog tags or guys named Rico with pitbulls in the passenger seat. Your son, bless him, has already decorated his file with three at-fault accidents and a pair of moving violations. He’s not just a risk, he’s provided ample proof of risk.

And while you live in what you call a cozy cottage, the rest of us would describe it as a log cabin in a fire-prone wilderness, hugged a little too closely by thirsty pines. The kindling dreams of a single match. There’s a reason no one wants to insure a tinderbox in a zip code that’s been blessed with a wildfire moratorium. And no, I can’t insure it. Because you’re a tree-hugging purist who refuses to cut down the very branches that might one day kill you in your sleep. You’re forty-five minutes from the nearest fire station and you want me to sleep at night with your policy on my desk?

You want a lower premium? Tell Isaiah to trade in that Charger for a beige Camry and a quiet life. Take your half-blind, octogenarian aunt off the policy, bless her soul, but actuarially speaking, she’s one pothole from disaster. And now you want to add your other son? The one who’s thirty-five, jobless, and chronically high?

You’re surprised your rate went up?

Gee wiz.

“Why do I need insurance?” they sigh dejectedly.

Because no one schedules tragedy. No one books a car accident for a sunny Tuesday afternoon. Insurance is the financial infrastructure of dread. You don’t buy it because it’s glittering or fun. You buy it because the alternative is ruin.

Let’s say, for metaphor’s sake, insurance is like a membership with pool access. A nice one. Not the Elks Lodge with the rusty soda machine and faded carpet, but Equinox, say, or the kind with cucumber water and eucalyptus towels.

You don’t go every day, but you could. You pay your dues to make sure no vagrant pisses in the deep end. But one day, an incontinent old man lets loose. Then a toddler who snuck in with a Pilates mom. Then, inexplicably, a scat fetishist.

Suddenly, everyone’s membership goes up. That’s pooled risk. That’s insurance.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to adjust my cardigan and remember to cancel Isaiah’s license before someone dies.

Every day, I talk to people. Well, maybe not exactly people in the truest sense, but more like a different breed of hominid. And no, it’s not exactly a race thing. I’m dealing with idiots from all backgrounds who are all stereotypically annoying in their own way. So, there are a few main types of people I sell insurance to. Let me break it down.

First, there’s the black crowd, descendants of chattel bondage, as American as magnolia and blood. They can be the warmest, the most willing, so long as you speak softly, and offer a better rate. The trouble is, punctuality isn’t always their strong suit. They forget. They delay. And so I’m left, like some desperate suitor, ringing them back again and again to update their payment method. Their cards have declined on five separate occasions.

Next, you’ve got the Spanish speakers. I don’t speak Spanish, and honestly, that’s on me.

Then there’s the majority: the boomers. They’re usually white, though not always. Changing demographics, Great Replacement, yada yada yada. They sneer at Millennials and Zoomers, call them lazy, entitled, godless. This, mind you, while living in mortgage-free houses their fathers built and their mothers polished. They curse the welfare state, but sip from it like it’s a family heirloom. They love to fight, too. I ask, “How much are you paying?” and they snap, “Tell me your rate.” So, I calmly explain, “Listen, dumbass (I don’t say dumbass, I say sir or ma’am), I can’t manipulate the rate. All I can do is get you as many discounts as possible. I am a captive agent. If your rate seems too low for us, I’ll save us both some time and politely end the call.” Once they settle down, and I figure out their predicament— usually a rate increase or a horrible claims process— I hit them with the assumptive close: “If I can get you a better rate and do all the work of switching you over, will you lock it in today?” They often say no. I mention the future discount and how locking in the rate now would be a good move. They say no again. Sometimes, I just hang up. Other times, I go through the quote, and when they don’t lock it in, they call me days later, shocked that the rate has changed. I told them rates could change, but they still act surprised.

Some of these people are vets with PTSD. They’ll start shouting random things like, “God bless America... Rod came over to shoot up my house… God bless America.” It's always a treat.

Then there are the upper-middle-class folks, hunting for a deal. They can actually speak English, so that’s a plus.

I don’t talk to rich people because their homes and cars are too big and too expensive to insure. They’re probably over with Chubb or PURE or AIG private client or VAULT or Cincinnati Insurance.

Onto New Americans™

There’s the Asian crowd, east or southeast, doesn’t really matter. They speak English, sure, but the accents are thick enough that I catch maybe every third word. I nod along anyway. They like to haggle. The Africans, fresh off the plane, usually, are the same way. Clipped, formal English wrapped in accents that turn sentences into puzzles. They expect to win something just by asking.

But the terror, the gut-wrenching panic, is that I might become them or rather, that we all might become them. Because that’s most people in America now—not Dickensian suffering, no—this is relatively banal abjection. Contemporary abjection. Where you speak to a drooling Boomer clinging to a crumbling house they bought in 1980, living on the wilted teat of Social Security and whatever pittance their “fixed income” gives them. They’re the lucky ones because they have insurance and don’t have to self-insure. I know Social Security will be a myth by 2050, a pipe dream for my generation, and they don’t care, and I don’t expect them to. We could end up worse than them. No house, no pension, no out. Just me, the CRM anus, and the never-ending shitstream of leads. But by then, this will all probably become automated.

I can’t shift gears fast enough to write this book. Every day reinforces the truth: rich assholes are better than poor assholes, even if they’re often stingier. The crumbs from the rich are still bigger than the dowries from the poor. Poor people will make you poor. They’ll infect you with their cost-cutting rot, bleed your margins dry, kill your ambition. They’re Balzac’s peasants—grasping, wretched, always reaching, never giving. Since I started in sales, my loathing for cost-conscious clients has become radioactive. They exhaust me. Broke people piss me off because they’re just as awful as rich people but broker. Being rich is not a virtue, but neither is being poor.

I know I sound like a cunt. I’ve got what some people call a Middle Eastern personality—abrasive, over the top, ultimatums— to put it in perspective my parents claimed they’d disinherit me when I was eleven years old— every sharp thing I say is meant both seriously and not. If I let myself feel something real every now and then, fine. But mostly I’m trying to avoid the smug sanctimony of seeming better than the recalcitrant toilet heads I talk to all day.

Saying I look down on them is more honest. Less contradictory. And I say that knowing I’m no genius myself nor am I special.

Sometimes I feel things. Briefly. That’s not nothing. But mostly I perform a kind of moral triage so I don’t start thinking I’m better than the sea of morons I talk to all day. People whose very syntax makes you lose your will to live. If I admitted I cared, I’d be doing what every other white-collar virtue merchant does: posturing and ignoring it.

To everyone reading this with a clean desk, a maxed out 401k, and an air-purifier beside you: you don’t realize how meticulously you’ve engineered your life to avoid speaking to people like the ones I talk to daily. Cold calling your average retail customer is as close as you’ll get to understanding the mental architecture of the guy shouting at pigeons in the Rite Aid parking lot. The cold calling I do is being handed a headset and told: go speak to America, Dunkin and stimmies. It’s not humbling. It’s revolting. And it’s probably made me worse.

But hey, at least now I’m shameless when it comes to cold calling. If you tell me to call anyone, I will call them. Yeah, yeah, insurance is recession-proof, and a job is better than no job, and I’ve been avoiding corporate for years and I like being a bohemian lay about, but good Lord do I want out. I want a job in private wealth management. I want to deal with rich assholes, not poor ones. I want to touch money, real money, not scrap for pennies from people who can’t afford a windshield.

Nah, never mind. I want to be a MILF. With marginally big, tastefully lifted, tits. A Volvo. Botox. A facelift when it’s time. A jewelry business that loses money. Three kids. I want to host a bar mitzvah so lavish the cantor needs a Xanax. I want to pick my son up from fencing practice, stash his sabre and our farmer’s market haul in the station wagon. I want to do it all with taut calves in a calfskin leather skirt, a silk pussybow blouse, and slingback heels.

I don’t care if my husband cheats, so long as he’s discreet about it. He doesn’t have to feign respect for my opinions just to get laid. I’ll do anal. I’ve done it three times. I already don’t vote. I already eat shit—figuratively, of course. I’m not some Russian girl in Dubai, though I’ve got to respect the hustle. I want to be a bimbo übermensch so badly. I want to be a sex object.

But I’m not a bimbo or an übermensch. I’m a mystery meat tschandala, a Cairene street urchin with a wig on my head.

And I’m tired, so tired of the shame. When my boyfriend carts me to some event and people ask what I do, and I have to say “insurance.” Then they ask what kind, and I mumble “home and auto” because I am a bad liar, and just like that, I’m beneath the floorboards—a roach, a sub-used-car-dealer insect. A scummy insurance hawker chasing corn nuggets in poopoocaca.

At least I’m still skinny.

PS: If I’m to confess one prejudice, and why not, since the hour is late and honesty feels seasonal, it’s that I wish more of this blog’s subscribers were women. That’s my most misandrist thought, if you like labels. A curious species of man insists on lurking here, the kind who eventually announces, with all the insight of a coffee table, “You’re so solipsistic, and you think you’re smart. You only get attention because you’re pretty.”

Well, thank you darling for the compliment. And no one dragged you here by the ears. This is, quite explicitly, a blog of self-involvement. Serialized, autotheoretical, a little too lavender for your taste, I imagine. It's a lilac blog. It was never meant to seduce you. It was meant to repel you. That you stayed long enough to feel betrayed suggests a failure not of the blog, but of your comprehension. I don’t claim to know the inner scaffolding of others, I’m only building mine in plain sight. I’m smarter than you in that regard. I assure you.

Some of you freaks unsubscribe then subscribe again.

Yet another addendum: Your opinion begins to matter somewhere around the neighborhood of eight figures. Eight figures you personally hand to me. Until then, take your shoes off quietly on the way out.