Blog Number 81

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

First, a small update.  Faithful readers, the fennel toothpaste is almost gone.  Hopefully when the wife buys a new tube, I will get lucky with the new flavor.

While driving to work today, I was listening to NPR (National Public Radio).  "Jon," you say, "you are a hip dude.  Surely you don't listen to 'talk' radio?"  Well, you are wrong.  It comes in at 90.1 on my FM dial and my favorite station is at 89.7.  So whenever it is not playing music, I switch up 2 turns of the tuning knob to the NPR station.

OK, now that that is settled, on to the random thought  As I was listening to NPR, they mentioned an interesting story out of China.  It seems that the local authorities were cutting the number of teachers in the schools.  All teachers EXCEPT WIDOWS and DIVORCEES with children, would be fired.  Amazingly, many teachers filed for divorce in order to keep their jobs!  Insane!

Or is it?  This story reminded me of the health insurance at my workplace.  "OK Jon, even with your twisted mind, how do you draw a line between the two?"  Easy, you see, you are only allowed to change your health insurance choices one time a year (during October, so this is fresh on my mind).  The only other time you are allowed to change your insurance is if there is a "qualifying" event in your family.  Qualifying events include births, deaths, marriage and (you guessed it) divorces.  I discovered all of this information a few years ago (I think in the month of May) when trying to figure out how to change health care providers.  Given that we were not going to have any more children and that I was already married, that left only death and divorce as my only means for qualifying to change my insurance.  I immediately ruled out death of course leaving me with my only option.  The only way to change my health insurance was to get a divorce.

Now this is absurd and the wife and I had a small laugh over the matter but I can appreciate (just a little) what these poor Chinese school teachers are going through.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon