The Case of the Symbol Spat

I did not know that strawberries bounced.

I learned this valuable lesson while standing in the produce aisle at Whole Foods, where a strawberry struck my forehead dead center, bounced off my wrinkled brow and clipped the tip of my nose on its ill-fated journey to the floor.

I wiped the juice off my face and immediately began to calculatethe reverse trajectory of the fl ying fruit to determine its point of origin. But without my slide rule, I had to make an educated guess, and I guessed that it came from two nearby women who were screaming and throwing fruit at each other.

“Ladies, ladies, ladies,” I said, jumping between them. “A little decorum, please! This is a Whole Foods after all, not a Piggly Wiggly.”

“Out of my way, mister,” said a slender blonde in a business suit, her hand clenching a pineapple, her arm cocked and ready to fire.

“This is not your fight. This is about my client’s insurance claim that her company denied!”

“In that case,” I countered, “I want you both to put down the fruit, tell me your story and let me decide.”

“Why should we listen to you?” asked the other woman, a tall brunette.

“Because I’m Ace Insura,” I said, grabbing two nearby Bartlett’s.“And this is your only chance to be judged by a jury of your pears.”

The mood lightened and the security guards backed away.

“I’m an agent,” the blonde began, “and my insured has a symbol 2 for liability and uninsured motorists. They asked me to delete several autos during the policy term, which I instructed her company to do. Later there was an accident with an uninsured motorist involving one of the deleted autos, after which it was revealed that deleting them was in fact an error since they still have the autos. We submitted the $8,000 damage claim under UM, but her company denied
it.”

“Obviously we denied it,” the insurer jumped in. “The auto was deleted. Under symbol 2, you cannot simply equate ownership with coverage.”

“Well, Judge Insura? Does symbol 2 really cover any owned auto or just autos on the policy?” the blonde asked.

The two women stared at me like cheetahs watching a limping gazelle, ready to pounce on my answer like, well, cheetahs on a limping gazelle.

“I think,” I said, pointing to a stack of watermelons marked at $10 each, “the price on the sticker is the price you pay.”

Why was Ace trying to sell them melons?

For help solving this mystery and to check your solution against Ace’s, click here.

Jonathan Hermann (hermannism@gmail.com) is an IA contributing editor.