Insurance is usually a very serious topic. We seek out insurance as a means to protect our loved ones, ours selves, and our property. Thinking about insurance means considering worst case scenarios. We buy life insurance to help our families financially cope if we become deceased. Car insurance makes one think about the potential of having a horrible traffic accident. Health insurance is doubly scary: we worry about becoming seriously ill, and we worry about how to pay for medical bills our insurance company refuses to. It isn’t very often that insurance makes us laugh.
Sometimes, you hear about strange insurance claims. There was a story in the news earlier this month about a football player that got an insurance policy on his hair. Celebrities often gain publicity when they get insurance on their legs, or other body parts. You don’t have to be a celebrity, however, to make a truly strange insurance claim.
Many people have contacted their car insurance company with amusing claims. A man once blamed his car accident on wasps that allegedly flew up his pants while he was driving, causing him to step on the gas while at a red light. There has been at least one claim from a man who blamed a zebra for his car accident. He was driving in a Safari park, and said a zebra wandered onto the road, causing him to collide with it. A man once claimed that the reason he rear ended a bus was because the bus was running five minutes early on it’s scheduled route.
If you have an iPhone, you can get iPhone insurance, in case the phone is damaged. People have given all sorts of reasons to describe how their iPhone got damaged or lost, when they file a claim about it. There have apparently been iPhones dropped from a hot air balloon, or lost while a person was skydiving. People accidentally bury their iPhones in the sand while making sand castles with their children, or in the dirt while working in their garden. Dogs have supposedly chewed up iPhones, and many iPhones were lost when the phone flew out of the open window of a car.
There also have been some unusual insurance policies. You can get riot insurance if you decide to go on vacation to a country that frequently has violent protests. Horse erectile dysfunction insurance exists. This is useful for breeders of race horses, who can make quite a bit of money when they breed a famous race horse. Exceptionally religious people might decide to get Rapture Coverage. These kinds of insurance policies are sold to people who believe that The Rapture, as described in the Bible, will, in fact, happen. Some Rapture insurance polices are designed to provide care for a person’s pets, who will be left behind without them after The Rapture. It is also possible to get alien abduction insurance, if you happen to be concerned about being abducted by aliens from outer space.
Taco Bell took out an insurance policy on one of their promotions. In 2001, Taco Bell offered everyone a free taco if the Space Shuttle landed on a Taco Bell marker that was placed in the Pacific Ocean. The insurance policy was to help them pay for all those free tacos, if that event occurred.
Quinn Dombrowski on Flickr