Amazing But True

I was at a managers meeting last week and one asked me to tell him the Midget Story. He’s heard it a half dozen times, but for some reason it tickles him no end. That story led to another and another, and there might have been some drinking going on. But the drinking really had nothing to do with the stories, just my desire to tell them. That got me thinking that perhaps I should relate a few of them here.

All but one of the stories is a bit risqué, so you might want exit now if you don’t want to hear about parts of the anatomy and certain particulars related to sex and stuff like that.

To set the stage let me first clarify that I have worked in the personal lines insurance industry for 29 years, 20 years of which have been in the claims side of the business. In claims, you are dealing with people who have had accidents and misfortune, and, inevitably, some of those misfortunes arise from their own peculiar behavior. While their injuries and damages are not funny, especially not to them, how they came to have them can be. On the other hand, their behavior after making the claim can be hilarious and just bizarre.

I shall save the Midget Story for last. To begin, where better than in a hot tub.

Turn The *&%$&# Thing Off!
My company flirted at one time with insuring motels. These were not the Holiday Inn or Best Western sorts of hotels, but more the Norman Bates (Psycho) type motel. One of our illustrious agents managed to write a policy for one fine establishment that rented its rooms by the hour, with closed circuit 24 hour porno movies on the TV and a hot tub in each room. I’m quite sure the agent failed to disclose these particular details to the underwriters.

One evening a guest is in the hot tub with a young woman. He was married, but the young woman was not his wife. As they were messing around in the hot tub, he gets this brilliant idea. He stuck his pecker into the out flow tube that circulated the water back to the pump. One supposes he was showing his girlfriend just how he wanted the thing done.

Well, he learned rather quickly that he did not want his girl friend to emulate the hot tub plumbing. The fit was apparently quite good and the pump powerfully sucked his member into the tube right up to his scrotum and then promptly formed such a vacuum in the pipe that it locked him in.

The pain must have been intense and he could not free himself for the pipe. He screamed at his girlfriend to turn the hot tub off. Unfortunately, the management of the motel had gotten tired of people messing with the controls and screwing them all up (pun intended), so they had put the controls under lock and key. The woman could not turn the thing off. It was hard wired so there was no plug to pull from the outlet. She had to put her clothes on and rush down to the office to get the night manager who had the keys to the controls. This she did, as excruciating minutes went by for our poor hero battling the sucky-sucky thing.

More bad news. Even turned off, the vacuum in the pipe did not abate and continued to hold our fellow fast. A hasty discussion occurred and they decided to call the fire department. After more long minutes, the fire department arrived. One can only imagine the scene as they all trooped in wearing their fire suits, boots and hard hats to perform the rescue. Oh and how they must have fought with all their strength not to bust a gut laughing at the poor fellow. It was rumored that some angry words were exchanged when one fireman innocently suggested that in order to rescue our wounded friend that they should use the Jaws of Life.

The fire department, however, was not equipped or knowledgeable enough to extricate the man. Simply trying to pull him off was likely to rip his poor appendage from his body. They quickly realized this and so put out the call for a plumber. Oh, how bad the pain must have been and seemed destined to continue for an unbearably long time. Plumbers, you see, are not quite as fast in response as the fire department, especially when you are waking them up in the middle of the night.

Eventually the plumber arrived and proceeded to dismantle the plumbing in the hot tub that allowed the vacuum to be broken and the member freed, quite a bit worse for wear. Our comrade was whisked away to the hospital where no doubt he spent a few anxious moments before the doctors announced they would not have to amputate. And then spent a few more when he realized that he was going to have to explain all this to his wife.

When the lawsuit came in, I was able to see it briefly before we sent it off to our commercial division; it made for interesting reading. I was especially taken with the theory of liability. The motel had wronged our friend in that they knew they were renting rooms to people who were there for purposes of having sex. In this knowledge, the motel should have realized that randy young men in the presence of naked women would be inclined to stick their members into anything that might provide them with prurient stimulation, including the outlet pipe of a hot tub, and therefore had a duty to such men to prevent them from hurting themselves in the process. The hotel failed in its duty to protect the poor defendant by not installing a screen over the pipe to physically prevent him from inserting himself into the suction filled tube, and for locking up the controls so they could not quickly be turned off once he had performed said insertion.

One wonders how any self-respecting man could bring himself to proceed with such a suit, but then again, his wife, the fire department, the motel and the plumber all knew and he was already a laughingstock, so he probably figured why not try to make a little cash out of his misfortune. I do not know if he was succesfull in that regard or not.

Lorena Who?
While we are on the subject, sort of, regarding male members and that whole suction thing, another story comes to mind. This one is not humorous, unless you’re somewhat twisted in your sense of humor.

In Oregon, during the time I was working there, and probably still today, every auto policy carried at least $10,000 of no-fault medical coverage that was dictated by statute. The statute provided the terms of coverage, which were generous. Among other things, the auto policy would pay for the medical bills and lost wages for injuries suffered while occupying a vehicle. Note that it did not require that the vehicle be in an accident, only that the injuries arose while the person was occupying the vehicle.

This allowed the courts, in abetting their tort bar brethren, to come up with some interesting definitions of “occupying,” as you might imagine. It got so bad that slipping and falling on an icy street while gripping the door handle of the car was considered occupying the vehicle. In any event, if you got hurt while in a car, the auto policy would pay for the doctor bills and your wage loss.

Going west out of Portland towards Beaverton (yes, that is the real name) is a freeway known as the Sunset Highway. It gets its name from the fact that in the afternoon and evening, you are driving directly into the setting sun. At the right time of day, it can make seeing in front of you very difficult.

One such day, our insured was driving in rush hour traffic westbound into the blinding sun. This is very busy traffic and there were accidents on this road almost daily. So our super intelligent gentleman is paying close attention to the road, right? Well, not exactly. It seems he couldn’t wait to get to Beaverton for his girlfriend was head down in his lap doing that suction thing.

If you watched the movie The World According To Garp, you know what happens next. Our fellow got excited, stopped paying attention to his driving, and at high speed, rear-ended the stopped car in front of him. The girlfriend’s jaw snapped shut, and…she bit it clean off.

The medical payments staff in my office got the pleasure of paying the bills and reading the reports of the injury and subsequent treatment and surgeries. It was a covered loss, both in the insurance and organ sense, and we were on the hook to pay for it because he was occupying the vehicle at the time of the…er…accidental amputation.

It turned out okay in the end. The doctors were able to reattach his member and, as I recall, he regained full use of it with no complications or other loss of, you know, length, function, stamina, etc. The interesting thing was that this happened at least six years before Lorena Bobbit took the carving knife to her abusive hubby. While the rest of the world was surprised to hear how Johnny Bobbit’s pee-pee was saved, we had already paid for the same miracle years before and were not the least bit surprised.

Feminine Wiles
Here are three stories, or rather just the highpoints of the stories about women and their attempts to use their charms to their claim’s advantage.

I was for a couple of years an auto physical damage adjuster, meaning I would write estimates and work with body shops to get cars repaired. One day I was given an assignment to inspect and estimate the damage to a mustang that our insured had backed into in a parking lot. The owner of the car said she could not bring it to our office, and could I inspect it at her house? We did that often so it was no big deal. When I showed up at the house, this attractive, blond, maybe 21 year old woman met me at the door. She flounced out in loose short shorts and a man’s t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and about four sizes too big for her. Did I mention she was not wearing a bra, and that the shorts were really short and really loose and she apparently wasn’t wearing any panties either? She proceeded to lead me all around the car showing me every scratch, ding and blemish. It was a rolling wreck of a car. There were many stops as she showed me everything, not only on the car’s body but her own as well. Believe me; a stripper couldn’t have put on a better show. I had no doubts about what this girl looked like in her birthday suit. So I followed patiently along until she judged the moment right and asked very sweetly how much I was going to pay her. I pointed out that since our insured had backed into her right front fender, I was not going to be able to pay for all the other damages to the hood, front bumper, left side, top, deck lid, rear bumper, torn seats, cracked dash, right door and right quarter panel. Once she realized that her ploy had not enticed me to pay anything more, she immediately crossed her arms over her chest, the show now being most definitely over, and announced that I was a pig and I could just speak to her husband about it. The last I saw of her was her cute butt in those short shorts going through her front door, which she slammed hard behind her.
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A fellow I knew in the business, whose name I will not divulge, though I’m sure he is long since retired, had a curious dilemma on one of his claims. He was trying to settle this soft tissue neck injury claim (incorrectly often referred to as a whiplash) with a mid-40’s aged woman. He would call her every couple of weeks to see if she wanted to settle, and she would say she wanted to wait to make sure she was completely healed, and then she would engage him in conversation for 20 minutes or more about topics completely unrelated to the claim. He complained about it to me one day after golf. I commiserated. It was often that people, especially older women and widows, would drag out their claim process because they were lonely and the adjuster was a captive audience. My friend said, however, that his claimant was married, seemed well off and lived in an upscale neighborhood and no doubt belonged to the local club, so she didn’t seem to fit the profile. Later, when we met up at an attorney firm’s Christmas party, he told me about his most recent run-in with his problem claimant. He called as usual and finally she said she was willing to settle. They agreed on a dollar amount, and my friend was going to mail her the check and release. She insisted instead that they do it in person and asked him to come to her house at a certain time the next day. He showed up on time and found a note on the front door saying she was in the back yard and to come around through the side gate. He did so and found her in the hot tub, naked, with a bottle of champagne on ice and two glasses. He immediately apologized, thinking he had gotten the time wrong and excused himself saying he would call her later to reschedule. She interrupted him and said she had been expecting him and he ought to get in the tub right away. He protested that he could not do that. She replied that if he wanted her to sign the release, he would get in the tub, or else she would retain one of her husband’s lawyer friends and sue his insured.

“My goodness,” I said. “What did you do?”

He replied, with a rueful grin, “What do you think I did? I got the damned release.”
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There was a time when I was a bodily injury claim adjuster and had reached the level of experience and expertise that they asked me to help train new adjusters. We had one young trainee, fresh out of college, who I was helping to train. I think she was a Mennonite. She always wore very tasteful suits, with the blouse buttoned up to her throat, the skirt down to mid calf and practical shoes with low heels. She was quite prim and proper, but smart and personable. I liked her. I believe she went on to be a very good adjuster and even a supervisor.

One day I got a new claim for a woman who had been a passenger on a motorcycle that our insured bumped from behind. The report said the bike did not go down; the woman hadn’t been struck and didn’t fall off, and didn’t complain about being hurt at the scene. The insured was strongly questioning how she could be hurt. Nevertheless, it was my job to investigate and take it seriously. I called the allegedly injured woman and she said she could meet me at her house that afternoon. I asked the trainee if she wanted to go with me on the appointment and she did.

We showed up at the house and knocked on the door. The trainee stood behind me and to the side, probably out of sight of the windows and from inside the door. That is the only way I can explain what happened next. The door flew open and the woman I was to meet turned out to be in her mid 20’s or so. She was attractive and had a nice figure. I know that because she was wearing a skimpy little leather vest that was not buttoned and therefore provided hardly any cover for her bare chest. She also had on leather chaps, you know the kind of leggings that cover the front of the legs but not the crotch or backs, and a black leather g-string. That was it, oh, except for the honest to goodness leather dog collar around her throat. She gave me a big smile and stepped back to invite me in, and then turned her back to lead me into the house, thereby letting me see most of the way to China. The expression that came over her face when she got to the living room and turned back around only to see our prim and proper trainee standing beside me was priceless. It turned out to be a considerably uncomfortable interview for the woman, especially as it became clear that being mostly naked wasn’t working on getting her money for her bogus claim and she was having to do it with the church lady sitting right there watching the whole thing.

On the way back to the office, the trainee couldn’t stop giggling. At one point she asked, “Was that really a dog collar?” and then giggled uncontrollably some more. I mentioned that I liked her, right?

Do You Have These in Black?
When I was doing auto physical damage claims in 1983 and 1984 we had a drive in set up. We had two bays with motorized garage doors on either end. An adjuster could inspect and estimate damages on a car every half hour, which made it much more efficient than driving to people’s homes or the body shop to see the car. I was working the drive in one day, when a woman came in without an appointment. She was in her mid-40s or so, attractive and well appointed with expensive looking jewelry, hair carefully styled, wearing an expensive looking wool suit with skirt and jacket, and patent leather high heels. She said she had just been driving up the street when a dog ran out in front of her and, in swerving to avoid it, she ran over a cement island. She said she had heard terrible noises and just knew she had damaged her car. Being insured with us and knowing our office was just a block or so down the street she decided to come right to see if we could help.

We were slow that day so I told her I would be happy to look at her car and had her pull it into the first bay. It was a big brand new Lincoln Town Car. One of our clerks asked her some questions while I prepared to look at her car.

I got out the creeper and put it on the floor by the front bumper. I pulled the inspection light down to the end of its cord and turned it on. Then I lay down on the creeper on my back and pulled myself under the car. I looked carefully for any damage. As I was under the car, I heard the door to the bay open and then the sound of high heels clicking on the cement floor. People often want to be in the bay while we were inspecting their cars, so I thought nothing of it. I could see no damage whatsoever under the front of the car, which seemed odd to me. I grabbed the front of the bumper and pulled myself on the creeper out from under the car.

And found myself looking directly up the woman’s skirt. She was standing in such a way with her legs slightly parted that the view went all the way to Christmas. The light I was holding illuminated the scene clearly, revealing a lovely pink garter and very sheer matching panties. She was a natural brunette.

I mumbled something like an apology and quickly pulled the creeper around the front of the car and to one side and slid back under the car. I could find nothing wrong here either, and, when I slid out from under the car, there she was again and I was looking right up her dress. I quickly pulled the creeper further down the side and slid back under. And, guess what? Well, you get the picture. She followed me all around that damn car and every time I would come out from under it, I got to admire her lingerie.

There wasn’t anything wrong with her car, and she was just so happy to hear it and thanked me profusely. As she drove off, the three clerks burst out laughing. They had watched the show through the bay's windows and realized what was going on. One of them told me that her husband sold shoes for years. He often came home with a new story of some woman in a dress or skirt, often not wearing underwear, who would try on pair after of pair of shoes, the whole time managing with each new pair of shoes to expose everything up her skirt for the salesman to see. My lady had just found a new twist on an old exhibitionist game.

The Midget Story
All of the stories so far have related to sex in some way. This one does not, but it does involve a Lincoln Town Car.

We insured a Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Portland. A new mall opened up across the river in Vancouver. The dealership worked a deal with the mall and placed new cars strategically though out the mall. They went a step further and put salesman on duty to talk to potential customers. The salesman on duty with the Lincoln Town Car was quite surprised to be approached by identical twin adult midgets who wanted to talk to him about the car.

They wanted to see inside it. He opened the driver’s door. Immediately, one of the midgets climbed up into the driver’s seat. He was so short that even sitting on the front edge of seat, his feet did not reach the floor let alone the pedals. The midget stood up on the seat, and grasped the steering wheel in both hands. He proceeded to make vroom-vroom sounds and move the steering wheel back and forth, as he pretended to be driving.

After several minutes of this, his brother wanted to have a turn at pretending to drive the car. The first midget refused to move. The second got angry. Next thing you know, the two midgets are in a fight. The salesman described them as rolling around on the ground, grabbing each other by the hair, throwing punches, kicking, biting, and generally looking like they were trying to kill each other. Finally one of them get loose and managed to climb into the Lincoln and fend off his brother long enough to close and lock the door. The salesman didn’t know if this was the original driving midget or the other one, he had completely lost track of who was who during the fight, they being identical and all.

The one locked out was standing in front of the car screaming bloody and nasty epithets at his brother. The one in the car suddenly discovered that the keys were on the driver’s side visor. He promptly inserted them into the ignition and started the car. He put the gearshift in Drive. Even though he couldn’t reach the pedals, he could drive at idle speed while standing on the seat to see over the dash to steer. This he proceeded to do, chasing his brother through the mall, the brother being unable to run faster than the car was idling.

Even at idle speed, a Lincoln Town Car can do a lot of damage to kiosks, storefronts, sidewalk cafes and more when being driven by a midget who has never driven a car before and is intent only on running his brother down. I have an image of that mall car chase scene from the movie the Blues Brothers, only being done in slow motion. The police finally caught up to the midget in the runaway Lincoln. They had to break the driver’s window to physically remove the rampaging midget from behind the wheel. He had managed to get the car stuck in the corner between two stores, and was trying unsuccessfully to get the car into reverse so he could run over his brother again, having done so once already and leaving him lying with a broken foot behind the car where it was stuck.

Of course, all the stores, restaurants and kiosk owners who had damage sued the car dealership. Everyone knows fratricidal midgets who are in jail have no money. I was able to read the Summons and Complaint briefly before we had to send it off to our commercial division to handle. The theory of liability was that the dealership had been negligent in leaving the keys in such a place that a deranged midget could find them during his attempt to kill his identical twin.

It seems likely that the midget driving the car was the Evil Twin out to kill the Good Twin. Or, maybe the Good Twin was the driver and just snapped because he couldn’t take the Evil Twin’s evilness any more. Or, maybe they were that rare combination of Evil Twin and his brother the Evil Twin. Or, maybe…