Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

6:57 am

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose; Nothing ain’t worth nothing, but it’s free…” ~Me and Bobby McGee by Kris Kristofferson

There was plenty of work to do.

The untidy cubicle featured a giant stack of printed-out, scribbled-on claims papers—some stapled to contractors’ estimates, others crumpled from having been tossed into the waste basket, only to be retrieved and scribbled on more. The scribbling was the hurried writing of a weary worker that didn’t care whether anyone but himself could cipher it. Next to the gun barrel-gray keyboard with the mostly rubbed-off letters and numbers rested a ceramic coffee mug that read, “Life’s a Beach,” had a hair-line fracture in its handle and was stained on the inside from years of hosting the black goop that passed for coffee in the break room. Along the bottom of the new flat screen computer monitor, sticky notes were placed with reminders to document this or email that.

File folders hastily labeled in the same careless handwriting as the claims papers were scattered on the desk, looking as if they might have been neatly stacked at one time, but someone rifled through them in a panic.

The plastic, Office Depot-bought desk caddy needed dusting. It held assorted highlighters, pens, a calculator, scissors, a stapler and three loose Camel cigarettes.

The nondescript, black office chair, tilted slightly backwards, was pushed away from the desk and turned toward the cubicle’s exit.

Two walls of the cubicle, the one with the entrance/exit in it and the one facing front were windowed walls. Well, the top half was windowed. The rest of the walls were covered in a fabric and made of the kind of bulletin board material conducive to push pins but not conducive to sound-proofing. To the left of the monitor was pinned a calendar with the familiar hieroglyphic-looking scribbling on it. To the right was a messy mosaic of family pictures, mostly faded, some creased, but all featuring laughing kids, a buxom, brunette mom and a beaming, balding dad. The newest of the photos was at least 25 years old.

The rest of the cubicle’s walls, above the desk level, were covered in printed-out reminders of this process or that mandate, some having yellowed under the fluorescent lights. The only indication of any sort of recreational ambition was a Dallas Cowboys schedule, pinned prominently to the back wall. It had a Sunday in October circled in black ink on it. But then that same Sunday had a big, red X over it. The message was clear: he had intended to go to that game. Probably had tickets and everything. Then, a storm hit somewhere in the Southeast or Midwest or maybe up in New England. And all bets were off.

When a big enough storm hits anywhere in the country, a catastrophe adjuster’s planned vacation gets unplanned. And quick. That is how it is. You work when there is work. You never know how long it will last. When it ends, you never know when it will start again.

The phone was shoved against that back wall directly below the Cowboys’ schedule and its attending headset was precariously clinging to the pushpin on which it had been draped, just to the right of the calendar. The red light was blinking on the phone. Which, of course, meant he was logged into his phone and somebody or a whole bunch of somebodies had been trying like mad to reach him?

His cubicle, which sat at the end of a row of six cubicles on each side of the middle aisle of the west wing, was meant to house two workers, but catastrophe adjusting for insurance companies is a come-and-go, up-and-down, ebb-and-flow business. At the moment, it was going, down and ebbing. No cubicles had more than one worker in them, and all through the sprawling, one-floor office complex, where the cubicles were laid out like a carefully-constructed, then haphazardly added-onto maze, more than half of them sat empty. Computers shut down. Phones silent. Chairs neatly pushed in.

Just four months before, every cubicle housed two workers and some of them had three people stuffed into them. There were makeshift desks in the aisles and the larger closets had been converted into workspace for processors and their laptops. The shared copiers never stopped spitting out papers for impatient adjusters from seven in the morning until seven at night.

Back then, there was a constant buzz in the place, reminiscent of a busy airport or a packed football stadium just before kickoff.

Now, it was so quiet, if you dropped your pen, the guy two rows over might offer to pick it up. If you coughed, same guy tossed a throat lozenge into your cubicle, maybe pinging you on the head or bouncing it off your desk into the waste basket.

There was not enough work to go around.

Thousands of anxious adjusters sat at home, begging for more time to pay their light bill or their truck payment, scrambling for an odd job—preferably a cash job—just to keep some money coming in, watching their bank account shrivel like a raisin in the sun, praying God smites somebody somewhere with a nice tornado, hurricane or hail storm so they can get back to work.

For the few lucky enough, good enough or connected enough to hang onto the scant “cat” adjuster jobs still available when the skies are too blue for too long; however, there was plenty of work to do.

 

7:13 am

“Where the Hell is Marty?”

Clyde Klingler was as ill-kempt as he was ill-named. His good-natured, mischievous father, who stuck him with the name Clyde just because he thought the whole name, when said together, made a fine tongue-tangler, apparently did not pass his sense of humor along to his son.

He did, however, pass along his bulldoggish features. Clyde had those same hanging jowls and heavy eye lids that made his eyes look half-mast even when wide opened. He had a pug nose and double chin. He was pale of complexion and whenever excited, angry or drunk, his nose and cheeks turned red in a spider-webby sort of way. He was a shade over 5’ tall and sported the kind of belly that beer bellies make fun of. The kind of belly that tests the tensile strength of shirt buttons. The kind of belly that looks ominous enough without the hernia it sported on its upper slope. The hernia was always a clearly outlined bubble under whatever poor, over-wrought, Oxford shirt he chose to wear to work.

Clyde was as small in his lower half as he was big in his upper. He had bird legs and a frying pan-flat butt. It seemed colossally unfair to expect such a meager base to support that kind of top-heavy load.

Kyle Parkinson, an adjuster under Clyde’s supervision, once joked to his co-workers that Clyde looked like the offspring of a Bulldog and

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: D. Gene Strother
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 10.07.2013
ISBN: 978-3-7309-3618-4

Alle Rechte vorbehalten

Widmung:
For all those who know that old insurance claims professionals never die. They adjust. And for Donya, whose ability to adjust and readjust and adjust again defies description. I love you.