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Impossible Insurance: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
Alice sells Bob an insurance. Let's say, a life insurance. Looks pretty good; the rates are low, but the payout is high, maybe a million dollars. But when Bob later takes a closer look to the small print, he finds out that his people may only collect the money if he is killed by lightning. In the bathtub. On a Tuesday. [In Utah, on a mountain top, during a rainstorm, while holding a llama...]
That's this trope: An insurance with conditions attached making it almost impossible to collect the money. Bonus points if the impossible becomes possible.
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* In one of the ''[[All Creatures Great and Small]]'' books, the narrator tells about some brothers and father who got slick talked into disability insurance. However, the joke was on the insurance company as they "managed" to somehow get injured repeatedly at an amazing rate as soon as the policy was issued. They remarked how it was strange how the company dropped them as soon as the policy term ran out but that they got another company, albeit at a higher premium, to insure them.
* [[Douglas Adams]] once suggested that insurance companies have [[Time Travel]], which is why whatever happens to you is mysteriously excluded from the policy ''and always was''.
* In ''[[Discworld/Guards! Guards!|Guards Guards]]'' Dibbler promises that his "dragon protection" cream will save you from being burned to death by dragon flame, and if it doesn't work then you get your money back (upon personal application only).
* An insurance company ''thought'' they were doing this, when they sold a policy to a young seaman in Tom Holt's ''Flying Dutch.'' But then he became the imortal captain of the Flying Dutchman, and after living to the impossibly old age that the policy required before it made any payout, the payout ''increased'' each year he survived beyond that. Now, if he dies, the insurance company is on the hook for more money than there is in the world, and through a variety of mergers, and such, they've distributed the risk to every bank and insurance company in the world, so they need him to go on living forever, or his death will destroy the entire world's economy.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Comedy Tropes]]
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