Back when they first made texting and driving illegal, a lot of people were still doing it.

My friend is rammed by another woman in a parking garage. When the police officer shows up, he thinks the woman who rammed my friend was just looking for a parking space, so he is writing a warning. 

Woman: “I’m so sorry; I shouldn’t have been texting—”

Police Officer: “What?! Texting?!”

He ripped up the warning and gave her a very expensive ticket, instead.

This story has been included in our June 2020 roundup as one of that month’s most memorable stories!

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I am a passenger on a bus which is packed to the point of being standing-room-only. A petite woman gets on and drops her change as she tries to find a place to stand. I am about to squat down to get it when a man next to me, who has a tiny bit more elbow room, reaches down instead.

Woman: “Thanks…”

Before she could finish thanking him, the man checked the coin’s denomination and shoved it into his pocket. He was so close that he could not fail to be looking at the woman the whole time as he did so.

Woman & Me: “…”

After a few seconds, it became clear that this wasn’t a joke. He had blatantly stolen her change right in front of her. Not wanting to start a fight on a packed and already late service, I pulled out what I thought was the right amount of money from my wallet and handed it over to her so she was now out of pocket thanks to his idiocy.

The guy glared at me, possibly because I didn’t drop any more change for him to scoop up.

Seriously, mate, if you ever read this, if you are so poor you have to resort to stealing dropped change on the bus, maybe you should stop spending your cash on expensive mirror shades, a fancy new iPod, and flashy silver necklaces.

I grew up in a tourist town in Colorado which got a lot of traffic from out of state. While local drivers aren’t always sane, the tourists tend to be even worse. Speed limits are broken, stop signs are ignored, double yellow lines are crossed, etc.

One day, my uncle is visiting and has picked me up from school. As we’re heading home, we see a driver from Texas obviously break a law, narrowly avoiding an accident.

Me: “Well, Texas drivers do tend to go crazy around here.”

Uncle: “[My Name], that’s not very nice. Different states have different laws; they can’t be expected to know them all.”

Me: “I’m pretty sure a red light still means ‘stop’ in Texas.”

My dad told me this story, as one of the strangest events he had ever witnessed in his life. At the time, he was visiting the US from Australia and had decided to go to a cafe for his morning coffee. The main road the cafe was located on had been blocked off and cleared by the local police for a bicycle race coming through the area.

There were signs everywhere, traffic cones, and policemen blocking off intersecting streets. But somehow, a car managed to get through the barriers, or partway through, and ended up stuck on the road. This all happened right outside the cafe, so my dad got front-row seats to the bizarre debacle that happened next. 

A policeman approached the vehicle and tried to explain to the driver that she had to turn around, as the area had been blocked off in anticipation of the race that was about to come through. To my dad’s astonishment, the woman completely ignored the policeman. She wouldn’t even roll down the window; she just pretended like she couldn’t hear him.

The cop got more and more frustrated, repeating louder and louder that she needed to turn around to keep the road clear, and she just continued to ignore him. It got to the point where the cop pulled out his gun and pointed it at the woman — something which completely shocked my dad because it would have been illegal for an Australian cop to pull out a gun under the same circumstances. But even with a gun aimed at her at point-blank range, and the owner of said gun yelling at her to get out of the car, the lady still ignored him!

Finally, the cop ended up using the butt of his gun to break the window, and only then did the driver acknowledge his presence. Just when my dad didn’t think things could get any weirder, the crazy lady got out of the car and started berating the cop for breaking her window, insisting that he was going to have to pay for the damage.

She was arrested, of course. The whole thing was so absurd that my dad could barely rationalise it; it almost seemed like a parody sketch or a prank of some kind. My dad joked that he had half a mind to go up to the two of them after all that to thank them for the entertainment they had put on for the tourists and ask where he was supposed to pay.

I work in Medicare insurance, getting people coverage through part C and part D. My job has many, many rules, and serious consequences for breaking them. One caller’s situation stands out.

She called in the middle of February, distraught, because another agent had called her and signed up for a new plan. 

This — in the first minute of the call — was my first red flag. It is illegal for a Medicare insurance agent in Wisconsin to cold call anyone, as well as to enroll them in a new insurance plan on an outbound call; agents can only ever enroll people who called them.

After sign-up, she’d run into trouble getting her prescriptions refilled, so she’d wanted to talk to her agent again. She’d spent more than a week trying to get in touch with him and had eventually found my number, thinking that my office was Medicare itself.

My office’s name does have Medicare in the title, but we always immediately clarify that we do not work for the government.

My workplace has an unusual approach to callers: no matter what they called about, spend at least ten minutes helping and continue to help for as long as they need. We are a sales office, but we’re paid hourly and our commission is negligible in order to support this behavior.

I start asking questions and track down the plan she’s been signed into. My first bit of good news is that it’s a plan that I’m contracted with; I can pull up the full contract and can figure out the answers to every one of her questions, but with every question she asks, my internal alarm bells chime a little louder.

Insurance agents are supposed to be responsible to their customers. Whoever this other agent was, he left her not knowing most of what she needed to know; he’d effectively bullied her into changing and then left her high and dry.

The medicine issue was actually coincidental; I told her what she needed to tell her pharmacist to clear things up but asked her to stay on the line and answer a few more questions, and I checked to make sure her family doctor was in the network of her new plan.

He was not, and the other agent had not even told her that changing plans would have restricted her from seeing him. This could have cost her thousands of dollars!

That medication issue that sent her to me saved her from an untold amount of hassle. The plan change could only go into effect at the beginning of the next month; the new plan wasn’t in place yet, and we could overwrite or cancel it just by submitting the paperwork.

I did one last piece of digging. Election periods are the times of year that a person is allowed the opportunity to change their coverage. If this other agent had submitted a change, what had he used? He hadn’t mentioned this to my caller at all. A quick rundown of options left only one answer. The other agent had used an election period called OEP to change her coverage.

OEP is effectively an emergency exit at the start of the year for when someone finds out that their plan is not suitable to their needs. Agents are prohibited from advertising or even mentioning OEP on calls; the customer must request a change or express distress before OEP can be brought up. Using OEP without the customer knowing or even understanding what was being done? Egregious.

So, I go through the paperwork with her and get her signed back into the plan that she had originally, and I give her the appropriate phone numbers to check up with her plan to ensure that she won’t have any trouble. But before we disconnect, I have one final errand for her.

I give her the phone number of the Commissioner of Insurance of the State of Wisconsin: the regulating body responsible for cracking down on bad insurance agents.

Let’s run it down, shall we?

Cold-calling a Medicare insurance customer, uninvited? $25,000 fine. Per person, if he’s called others.

Enrolling her on an outbound call, willfully signing her up into an unsuitable plan, and abusing OEP? Forfeiture of license, along with twice the value of any money they hoped to gain by doing this, plus a $5,000 fine and up to three years in prison. 

That’s three counts of it, mind you, so up to six times the money he tried to make, a $15,000 fine, and nine years in prison, and probably being banned from insurance work in the United States for life.

If he’s done it to one innocent old woman, he’s probably done it to others. I will never know the fallout from the case, but knowing the tools at the Commissioner’s fingertips, I’m reasonably confident I got a swindler his comeuppance.

This story was featured in our May 2020 roundup!

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