A peril in insurance is an event that can contribute to a loss. Insurance deals are often made in terms of specific perils.

• A shipping company might want to insure their goods against damage, and choose specifically to include in the coverage the perils of derailment, dropped load, and refrigeration failure. If the rail car then catches fire, the loss is not covered by that insurance deal.1¹ Unless, I suppose, you successfully argue that the fire caused refrigeration failure, which then spoiled the goods independently of the fire.
• A rockstar ninja programmer might want to insure their hands against damage, and choose specifically to include in the coverage the perils of crushing, diagnosis failure, and freezing. If they then get diagnosed correctly but the doctor issues an incorrect prescription (a separate peril), subsequent loss of income is not covered.

There are some attempts at standardising lists of perils, but these lists have to cover everything all participants want to write into their contracts, so they end up being all over the place. They include very sensible perils like

• Booster rocket failure
• Complications at birth
• Coup d’etat
• Data destruction
• Deck equipment damage
• Ground handling
• Mould
• Landslide
• Runway excursion

But then there are also those that make me laugh. Don’t get me wrong: perils are always sad events – clearly – since they cause a loss for someone. Sometimes that loss can be quite grave. I don’t mean to insult anyone who has suffered from any of these things. Reading these long, sad lists of bad events could be depressing, but I keep my spirits high by inventing alternative readings that are absurd.

An illustrative example is blade strike, which is when you want coverage for accidents around wind turbines. But there’s no way to look that up, so you have to just know that blade strike refers to wind turbines. As a lowly software engineer and non-practitioner, I read that peril and my mind immediately goes to the kind of insurance you want to get when you’re really into swordfighting.

Here are some more, along with fake explanations for what they mean.

• Contact with fixed object. The that-doorframe-came-out-of-nowhere insurance.
• Contract bonus. When you agree to pay extra for good work, but didn’t expect the work to be that good.
• Crew PA. An airplane intercom announcement gone really bad.
• Excessive material stress. Protection against when the thing breaks.
• Fall from height. As opposed to a fall from below?
• Foreign object. Whenever surprising artifacts start mysteriously appearing anywhere you better call your foreign object insurance provider.
• Life saving surgery. I hate it when I get life saving surgery. Glad I got insurance against it.
• Maladroitness. We asked them to do it, but then we looked at the result and found out they suck at it.
• Missing vessel. Someone towed the ship out of the environment? Note that this is different from mysterious disappearance in that the disappearance was under very clear circumstances.
• Offices and content. The work-from-home crowd was correct all along. Offices (and their content) are damaging and we better insure against it.
• Prize indemnity, statistical. When you set up a lottery with an unlikely, but fantastical top prize – and then some idiot goes on to be really lucky and win the prize and you have no way of paying for it.
• Rejection. Yeah, that sucks. I didn’t know you could get insurance for it.
• Sending loss. The insurance you need if you are particularly prone to utter the words “hold my beer”.
• Stuck pig. This has nothing to do with animals, but it really sounds like it does.
• To be confirmed. Let me get injured first and tell you what I want covered later.
• Wrongful consulting. The white-collar version of maladroitness.

I don’t know what it is I want to say with this but it amused me.