Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-11-02 - 8:50 a.m.

The Value of Things

How do we measure the value of things?

When I took macroeconomics in college, we talked "utils." I loved "utils". Utils made a lot of sense to me. Not dollars and cents, but units of utility. I have something, a possession, which has a hell of a lot of utils, and now it may be taken away from me in exchange for a small check in dollars and cents.

Apparently, according to law, I offered to sell this item the minute I let it get hit by a bus yesterday. The insurance company - THEIR insurance company - may, probably will, make the decision that the repairs outweigh the value of the vehicle, and take title to it in exchange for a check for the Blue Book Value. And if you know what I drive, you know how small this check will be.

Okay. This is not supposed to be an essay about how unfair life is, or how impossibly ludicrously stupid it is that I may lose my very own car because I had the bad luck to be hit when I wasn't even present. This is supposed to be about utils, and what things are worth to us, and what we sell them for - even when we don't want to.

So the insurance company may try to take my utilful car, and give me a check for dollars, and this check will have absolutely no value to me in terms of utils, because it can in no way be transformed into a means of family transportation; we can't possibly get up early enough to ride a camel to school. Not even if one could be had cheaply. The check will be useless.

They don't really want the Colt; it has no utils at all, to them. And I am told they may even offer to sell it back to me for a paltry sum. Now THAT'S fascinating; I will be able to BUY back my own car, for say, $100, leaving me with $100 less than the original check, which was already less than the cost of getting it fixed. So I will certainly come out far ahead on THAT transaction, for the stupidity of having parked my car right in the path of a wayward bus that was arriving in ten minutes.

The car is worth nothing to them; the check would be worth damn little to me. What I need - the utils I need - are reliable family transportation, preferably with Beanie Babies in the back seat, a glove box that's hard to close, and the funky roof rack that the tent poles fell off on the freeway two summers ago. My car is brave and trustworthy and sturdy and beloved, and has utils beyond count - when it's in MY possession. What the insurance company needs - what has utils for them, I assume - is minimal hassle factor and expense. Clear the damn claim. I will do what I can, including compromising on what repairs will be done, to preserve the utils in my car and avoid having them converted to useless money. On the other hand, if they decide to total my car, they will have to run their tow truck over a single mother and two young children, and then cut through the chains locking us to what's left of the rear bumper. Hassle factor? I'll show them hassle factor.

Never mind that it is stupidly unfair that I should have half-ass repairs done on my car and drive it around damaged, when the accident was not my fault. (No one seems to argue that it WAS any of my fault, me not being present at the time; thankfully, no one has opened the issue of karma.) I'm willing to accept that life is unfair, and that sometimes you just have to buy a bigger jar of Vaseline. I'm a realist.

But I can't believe that both the insurance company and I are going to work this out so we BOTH get less utils. That just doesn't make any sense at all. More utils for everyone, I say.

So I lied. The essay turned out to be about insurance and how I don't want them to take away my car. Oh well; it's what's on my mind. We'll see what happens. And cross your fingers for me.

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