Do you know how to tell if you have officially reached Over-the-Hill status?
Well, here’s one way. By the number of life insurance offers you receive in your mailbox on any given day. Offers from life insurance companies who are offering you wonderful news! Wonderful news that, even though you are so old you could kick the bucket any second now, they are still willing to step up to the plate and offer a poor ol’ geezer, such as yourself, some life insurance!
Of course, life insurance companies don’t actually come out and say it quite like this because they are nothing if not tactful about your upcoming demise. Even though they secretly believe that you are not only “Over the Hill” but are racing down that hill at breakneck speeds in the Soap Box Derby of Old Age, they would prefer, instead, to tell you they are simply offering you insurance for “loss of life” implying it could be anybody’s loss of life, not necessarily yours.
After all, the last thing a life insurance company wants to do is to upset you right there at the mailbox. You could keel over before signing up for their life insurance.
Frankly, I would respect these companies a lot more, if they would just come out and say what they really mean. Perhaps something on the order of this:
Dear Rapidly Aging Linda Vernon,
After studying your date of birth, our company has deemed you officially Over the Hill, which means that while you may not be next in line to Go to a Better Place, the line’s moving quicker than you think, and since you are done for anyway, would you mind if our company made some money off your impending doom?
All you have to do is mail us a premium every month, which we’ll keep until you die –at which time, we will give a little bit of that money back to your loved ones or whomever.
Semi-Sorta-Sincerely yours,
Liberty Mutual Prudential Colonial of Omaha
Now, another way to tell if you are officially Over the Hill is by how you are treated when it comes to senior discounts.
When I was in my 50’s, clerks would ask me if I was 55 yet, because if I was –they would cheerily inform me — I qualified for their senior discount –a question which I found to be quite insulting at the time for two reasons: 1) they were guessing I looked old enough to be 55. And 2) they were guessing correctly.
But now that I’m 61, clerks don’t even ask me how old I am, they simply give me the senior discount automatically. And the thing is — I don’t mind! Why? Because now I don’t really care how old they think I look, I just really want that senior discount!
A fact which, I’m afraid, either qualifies me as being officially Over the Hill or at the very least has me trending toward official Over-the-Hill status at an alarming rate.
So let’s clear up the confusion. If you are of retirement age, but are uncertain as to where you fit in on the Over-the-Hill spectrum, I’ve taken the liberty of making up the following list to help you categorize yourself:
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