Tomorrow we leave for wine country, but that leaves me with one whole evening to bitch about work! Again!

It's not even work qua work that I'm gabbling about, really. Not the job itself. No, it's something else. Yesterday, I attended a required meeting . . . but it wasn't really a meeting! Not at all! It was a "benefits fair"! WHO DOESN'T ENJOY A FAIR? Well . . . everyone. At least when the "benefits fair" is really just a fair in the sense that "sit in this room and listen to insurance nerds for over an hour" is a fair. The worst fair in the history of man.

What the fuck, man? Benefits fair? Eat me, benefits fair. Though I sure do looking forward to future celebrations such as benefits rodeos, benefits orgies and benefits carnivale. I will throw beads at those insurance broads, and they'll show me their tits! Or, possibly, actuarial tables! Oh man!

What was most galling about the benefits bukkake blockbuster was its utter pointlessness for most of us. We were told up front, "If you are happy with your benefits package as it is right now, you don't have to do anything!" At which point I started to get ready to leave. "But we've got representatives from all of our service providers here to help you decide." I sat back down. FUCK!

So they had people there from our PPO plan, our HMO plan, our vision plan, our dental plan, our life plan, our flex spending plan, and a couple guys from our I Don't Fucking Know plan. One guy's last name was Rock. Another's was Funk. I started mentally rechristening the rest of these boring people. Talk to me, Glen Hip Hop! Give me the 411, Polly Polka!

It was all just wretched and dull, of course. "We have a very useful website," said Mr. Dental Plan. No shit? "Members are always able to log into our website," explained Ms. HMO. Mmmm. "You can find a physician on our website," added Mr. vision plan. OH MY GOD PLEASE STOP TALKING. As if you'd have any claim to credibility without a website in this day and age. Are you kidding me? I'd actually love it if someone copped to not having one. "Say, do you guys have a helpful website?" "Nah. Websites are for fairies."

So it was, as I've said, unbelievably dreary. What made it even worse was, when these hopeless presenters--all of whom were just awful at public speaking--asked, "Any questions?" My coworkers actually asked them. One gal wanted to know about how best to handle her child-care tax credits. Hanh? "I, uh, I'm not a tax attorney," the guy stammered. "So you don't know?" she followed up. Holy shit, shut up so we can leave! Other questioners in the airless room, thanks to lousy acoustics, sounded like Charlie Brown's parents. "Hi, thanks for coming. I'd like to know WAAANH WAAANH WANH WANH WANH." The horrible public speakers would then say, "All right, good question! If you didn't hear her, the question was, WAAANH WAAANH WANH WANH . . . "

The only interesting person to me was the woman who uncomfortably gave her spiel about our life insurance policy, mainly because she had to keep using the phrase "accidental death or dismemberment." There's really no way to use that phrase in a jaunty way, after all. "Hopefully nobody here will need to use it," she said at one point. Aw! That's sweet. Yes, I'd like not to be dismembered. It would also be swell to not die.

I also got to thinking, We should jazz up this policy. It's such a downer. She kept saying "accidental death and dismemberment," as if people routinely un-accidentally lose their arms. I think we can spice things up for this woman.

That's when I got the idea for a new kind of coverage: Awesome death or dismemberment. This would be a policy where, if you were spectacularly maimed or killed somehow, there would be a way to determine if the beneficiary should be awarded a bonus for the relative awesomeness of the event was.

"Mrs. Miller? This is Gumbo Snood with Monolithic Insurance. My deepest condolences on the loss of your husband."

(Broken sobbing.)

"Mrs. Miller, after reviewing this claim, we couldn't help but notice that your husband was--" (shuffle of papers) --"killed in a knife fight with . . . dwarves? Is that correct?"

"Y-yes. Those little demons came at him with such ferocity. Such tiny ferocity."

"Mrs. Miller, I can't take away your pain right now, but I think I have some good news. In addition to your normal insurance benefits that you will receive, Monolithic is also add in an extra five hundred thousand dollars to be paid to you."

"Wh--what? But why?"

"Mr. Miller was enrolled on our Awesome Death and Dismemberment plan. And after thorough review, we have concluded that your husband's grisly death by knife-wielding dwarves . . . well, it's hard to argue that that wasn't pretty awesome."

"I . . . I don't know what to say."

"There's nothing to say, Mrs. Miller. I just hope that this extra settlement benefit can bring you some peace over the death of your husband. Which, as I've said . . . was totally awesome."