You’re likely familiar with the fact that earlier this year, Knoxville and the surrounding area was mildly destroyed by a series of severe hailstorms.

The damage was mostly superficial. Interestingly, superficiality is kind of a huge driving force in our economy. Do you think the daily stock market reading says anything really deep or meaningful about the American economy? Does Obama’s low approval rating evidence him ceasing being a cheerleader for nearly every moral issue he campaigned against as a senator?

Abstract, vague simplifications keep people feeling included. And judging by how much these public gauges have evolved over time, they’re not getting any less useless any time soon.

What’s a lot more obvious than the stock market, but no less superficial, is the visible damage on everyone’s house in Knoxville from getting carpet bombed by high-velocity balls of ice from the sky. Needless to say, the economic impact was overwhelming. FEMA got involved with supplementing insurance claims. The threat of plummeting property values was very real — thankfully something the insurance companies didn’t want either (who would pay the premiums?). Thousands of jobs were created instantly to make everything pretty again.

I was one of those jobs, gainfully employed as a direct result of destruction and human suffering. I had about as much roofing industry knowledge as you do. The emphasis of my job was on “the numbers game” of driving out to as many of Knoxville’s damage-saturated neighborhoods as possible and getting people to sign contracts with us — the “financial” side.

The industry knowledge required to actually hustle roofs to homeowners is a lot to acquire in the little over a month I had before school started again.

I was barely trained and was sent out to assertively talk to people about investments usually worth a better part of a million dollars. Most of the time I was a sales representative, a title that didn’t quite represent the fact that I was tasked with distilling industrial, corporate and financial knowledge to complete strangers, constructing detailed estimates based off my own manual measurements, and being in direct contact with people, signed and unsigned, at all times.

I never saw myself as much of a salesman. O.K., I find marketing as whole to be abhorrent, immoral and based primarily on deception, but the sheer demand for this service I was peddling — roofs, siding and gutters — made it actually rather fun after a week or so of cluelessness. My presence was always in context to the doors I knocked on, and the several times I’ve gone out solo looking for untapped neighborhoods nobody has ever been extremely rude to me. A wonder. In fact, based on what the insurance companies paid out to some people, I felt like I was actually helping people. After all, insurance companies are known for supplementing claims when their estimates come up short as long as they have evidence that you’re not going to Vegas with their check.

After interacting with so many homeowners from all over conservative Knoxville and Farragut, the most interesting trend I found was people’s attitudes towards the private sector when it actually came down to business. It seemed like 50 percent of my clients expressed concern with doing business with an “outside” company, feeling more comfortable with “local” business. Anybody who wasn’t local was a “storm chaser.” Honestly, you’re all communists. Insurance is like extra taxes that you pay ... to the private sector, heck yes! And large, successful industry comes swooping in to both meet demand and save your investment from losing precious value, working closely with the insurance companies to get it done right, and what do you do? You complain about it. “Oh, they’re out of town — what if they leave before my warranty expires?” Well, maybe you shouldn’t hire someone who’s so off-the-grid to build your roof, you profit-hating liberal.

The moral here, if there is one, is to live your politics. Knoxville had the most property damage of anywhere in the nation for a while there, and the private sector took care of it all by efficiently meeting catastrophic demand. So feel a little kinship with the people trying desperately to get at your insurance money, won’t you?


— Wiley Robinson is a junior in ecology and evolutionary biology. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.