Healthy, Wealthy and Nigeria

For those of you expecting Healthy, Wealthy and Wise, I'm sorry. There is no fat bastard flogging Bi-Lo supermarket products. Seek elsewhere if such is your fancy. For those of you with an interest in my latest rant, read on.

Thus far I've chalked up almost two months in my new found employ as an insurer of all things medical and health related.

In this time I have learned 3 things.

Healthy - How important it is to be so.
Wealthy - Why this is even more important.
Nigeria - How much I hate this lying, cheating, fraudulent shithole.

Firstly, the health side of things. Let me just say, that nothing has given more of an incentive to maintain my long term health and get fit, than some of the medical reports I read in this job. As I was saying to my mother on the telephone the other week - she of the gimlet eye when it comes the saturated fat in the meal - it is astonishing how bad so many people have let their health become. She concurred, and in the same breath demanded to know what I'd had for lunch. (A Marks and Spencer sandwich, if you must know.)

I've lost count of the number of applications I've filed which include words such as high blood pressure, diabetes, obese BMI and suchlike. Unhealthiness seems to be a given amongst people these days. I mean, I even had a guy submit an application who'd had a heart valve replacement and was still smoking 10 a day. Declined, of course. I mentioned it in passing to Chirpy, he of the medical expertise, who gave, in my estimation, a very sound medical opinion.

"Yeah, he's gonna die."

And that's the thing. A lot of this job is looking at people who are ticking time bombs, people who are going to die in their 50's. The trick to remaining profitable is to pick the ones who are duds, or those which have a long enough timer that you manage to extract sufficient cash out of them before they turn up their toes.

Heartless? Perhaps. We are an insurance company after all. It's to be expected.

This brings me on to wealthy. I don't really have a lot to say about being wealthy except to say that if you're sufficiently wealthy you'll be able to afford hospital treatment without needing insurance. So, it doesn't matter if you have the physique of Marlon Brando in his dotage, the appetite for alcohol of Winston Churchill and the eating habits of Elvis in his final years - provided you have the money of Bill Gates it doesn't matter, because you won't need to deal with tie wearing nob-ends like me who'd like nothing matter to slam a declined stamp on your paperwork because you're a fat bastard.

And finally, the last point to make. I HATE NIGERIANS.

This may seem kind of strong. But, let me explain. Some of you, may have received what is described as a spam email over the years. Perhaps it was one whereby someone offered to send you money, via bank transfer, because you had miraculously come into some vast fortune which some solicitor in Nigeria was offering to you.

See, this is the thing. In Nigeria, they buy old computers. Hard drives included. Even if the Hard drive has been formatted, they can still recover credit card information off these hard drives. Which they then use - and I am still at a loss to understand why - to buy health insurance. From us.

Therefore, I get a series of charming emails, all in caps lock, which follow the usual pattern.

- HELLO I LIKE TO BUY HEALTH COVER PLEASE TO RESPOND I THANK YOU FOR SPEAK TO ME I AM 26 AND LIVE IN NIGERIA

Now, I'm not going to type every example out in full. But the gist is as follows:

- Introduction from Nigerian.
- Response from us, saying we require the following information.
- Nigerian advises of all information, except for one critical point.
- Request from us for critical point.
- Critical point provided and bullshit about needing application asap and can we skip normal procedure
- Cold, humourless reply from us, advising of application process.
- Application form submitted by Nigerian, normally missing information.
- Reply from us, stating that credit card details supplied with form are under a different name.
- Nigerian advises us to call number he provides, saying card belongs to (Insert relative here.)
- We call number and get someone who doesn't speak English living in some shithole in downtown Lagos.
- Advise Nigerian we won't accept credit card payment.
- Nigerian provides new card, this time in "his name".
- We take payment.
- We receive letter one month later from Barclays Bank, advising transaction is fraudulent.
- We refund money to bank and deny all claims.
- We shred all documents and send rude emails to Nigerian advising of cancellation.

Actually, I'm not sure why we even take business from Nigeria. All of it, at least that from native Nigerians has all been bollocks, in my experience. If I ever start an insurance company I will specifically include NO NIGERIANS in the policy wording.

So, there you have it. Healthy, Wealthy and Nigeria.