Two Life Insurance Stories

Seeing a recent story here about insurance reminded me of a couple of stories from when I did a similar job.

Both of these were from when I worked customer service for John Hancock life insurance around.2006 or 2007. And yes despite being an American company they ran their customer service out of eastern Canada for a few years.

First story. Not much to it. I had a woman call in to collect a death benefit on a policy. It was a pretty common thing. You always had to be careful with these for obvious reasons. I’m going through all the usual things and then I have to ask what their relation is to the deceased. She said it was her son. I offered condolences. I then had to ask how he died. “He was murdered.” Wow. That took a moment to process. The rest of the call was normal but that part just always stuck with me.

Second one is a bit better. Back in the 1980s the company sold these cheap policies with a $500 benefit. Useless these days, and the parents would open them up for newborns. So these kids would in to cash these policies out. Of course they had to verify it which meant sometimes having to recall an old street address.

This one policy this guy was going over every address he could think of and there was no match. He was getting frustrated. I could see that it was in fact a military address so I asked him if this father had served. He said he did and was able to scrounge something up that had the address on it. I guess it never occured to him his father would’ve used a military address for the policy.

That’s it. Not much else to offer for now.