Last Thursday I learned that my car is officially a “total loss” and was worth a whopping $2083.36 (after you take off my $500 deductible). $2083.36… It sounds so exact, so calculated, so utterly and incontrovertibly true. There’s no way they could have rounded to the nearest dollar, even though that would have saved them 87.8% the worth of a stamp. No, they couldn’t have rounded because that wouldn’t have been the true worth of my car. 36 cents less, and they might be accused of not paying me my due. 64 cents more, and they’d be absolutely giving money away, and that would be bad business practice no matter how you add it up.

Staring at the notepad where I jotted down that definitive number as agent Jon walked me through the next steps, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d hoped the poor car had been worth more. Just two years ago, when I bought the car, Kelly Blue Book had thought it was worth about three times that, and my cursory searches the night before had led me to hope that it might be worth half again or twice that. But the insurance company knew better, right down to the cent.