Umpire Clause

This one isn’t about instant replay, or about getting robots to call balls and strikes. It’s about resolving disputes with your insurance company.

You're trying to make a jello salad, and you read the directions wrong. You end up filling your house with thousands of gallons of jello. The cleanup is going to cost thousands of dollars. You file a claim with the insurance, but they reject it. They say the fine print of your policy excludes hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and jello-related floods.

You disagree that the incident counts as a "flood." (Jello isn't a liquid, you argue, so how can it flood?) You think that your claim is valid, despite what the company says.

There is a process for figuring out which of you is right, laid out in the umpire clause. It provides for resolution through an arbitration process, where a third party looks at the case and determines whether the policy should cover it or not. They can decide if there is, in fact, always room for jello.