I didn’t want to hijack the thread for the Zombie game, but it made me think about a conversation my husband and I had the other night. Say Night of the Living Dead/Shaun of the Dead/28 Days Later type scenario came into play. We wake up tomorrow, there’s a zombie disease infecting, killing and then reanimating the corpses of those we know, love, hate, whatever.
Say my husband gets bitten – he succumbs and is the walking dead. He’s worth about $500K dead – do I get a payout? Seriously. You have to actually die to become a zombie, whether your head gets blown off a la NotLD, or you just become a cashier drone at the local minimart a la SotD – would insurance have to pay out?
I figure they’d find a loophole to get out of paying, but I am pretty sure that with no pulse, missing internal organs, and all the joys of being the walking dead, it shouldn’t be that hard to get a death certificate on him. And after all, that’s really all that they require – proof of death, right?
well, sure, but who are you going to get to certify the certificate? If I were the county coroner, I would have left town already if there was a zombie infestation. Wouldn’t you have to get close enough to get infected yourself to verify the lack of pulse?
Every zombie movie I have ever seen I remember seeing images of the zombies digging out of their graves. I assume that they had to have been dead for at least a few days if they have been buried at that point, so you probably could collect on the life insurance policy. I am an insurance agent but I don’t deal with life insurance and I have never had to deal with a zombie claim so I can’t say for sure, but with a good insurance company you would already have the check in hand by the time he reanimated and began searching for brains.
This raises a larger issue. Is there really such thing as an undead? DHZ is up and about, moving around, and has a healthy appetite. That closely resembles “alive.”
And let’s suppose you did the only right thing and you blew his brains out. Could you be charged with murder?
Now, see – this is why I loved Shaun of the Dead – it was way more realistic than other zombie movies. I mean, ya know, people start acting weird and nobody really notices until it’s pandemic. And there’s the whole “I don’t really want to shoot my mum” part…
See, I am thinking along the lines of that movie – where it’s a disease. You become infected, die (either from wounds that caused you to become infected or whatever) and then are re-animated. For those who have not seen SotD, it’s definitely worth watching
Obviously, if you are one of the zombies from a classical movie like NotLD, where you were already buried, yeh, your life insurance has already paid. In the case of being a living being who becomes infected…well, hopefully you’re one of the first ones, so the doctors pronounce you dead shove you in a body bag and then you come out of there – does the insurance pay? Do I need to give proof of zombification? hmmmmmm…things to consider…
There was a great thread here once that I totally didn’t know enough about the issues involved, but it was “Can Blackacre vest in a zombie?” or something.
Don’t most medical centers these days define ‘death’ as ‘brain death’? I think that most zombies wouldn’t give a significant EEG reading, and so would count as dead. Especially the old-school zombies, which are mostly rotted anyhow.
I don’t know. But I spent some time yesterday wondering how Vampires could wash their hands in those washrooms that have motion detector faucets. I mean, they have no reflection, so how’s the IR detector supposed to “see” them?
Perhaps the same way people looking directly at them can see them. Not having a reflection doesn’t necessarily mean no devices react to their image. What it does mean is unclear, as I don’t believe the mechanism of action is specified, but if they’re not actually full-on invisible in every way, then there’s some room to work with here.
