Good hands, bad hands, it all depends on your perspective

We do not have Allstate insurance, mostly because I had one tiny little wreck, an ACCIDENTAL wreck, in the parking lot of St. Anne's in New Castle, bending a fence post and bruising some chain link. And almost totaling my minivan. You would have thought I'd purposefully driven a tank straight at the Hoover Dam, the way they acted up at the home office. Our agent, a lovely and funny woman named Janet, put it to us this way: "They dropped you."

"Dropped us?" my husband said, his voice rising. "I've had this insurance since I was eighteen years old! You've been my agent for twenty years! How can they just drop us?"

Chagrined, she looked down at a sheaf of papers on her desk, picked one up and said, "They say here that anyone who could cause that much damage in a church parking lot was not a good risk." She and my husband traded a glance and Janet started to say something, then closed her mouth as if she'd reconsidered.

My husband turned to me accusingly. "Allstate canceled our insurance," he said, as if I weren't there sitting in Janet's other chair listening. "Because of your weird little wreck. If you'd taken our that statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, they probably would have come to our house and put you down like a rabid fox."

"Yes, but I'm a really good cook and we can get another brand of insurance," I said compellingly. "Can Allstate insurance fix you a homemade chicken pot pie with the real vegetables and the homemade chicken stock? Can they make that pie you like with the melted candy bars and the Hershey's syrup?"

"No," he admitted grudgingly, shifting in his seat. "I suppose not."

"Well, good, then, that's all settled!" I got to my feet, shook Janet's hand and headed for the door, calling over my shoulder, "Hey, honey, can we go to Los Amigos for dinner? I really don't feel like cooking."

So my experiences with Allstate have not been all that great, but this commercial featuring actor Dean Winters playing the strangely sexy Mayhem just couldn't be funnier.