Dollars & Sense

This recording of a telephone conversation a guy had with a number of staff, including two managers, at Verizon is a bit long, but very amusing.

Basically, he used roaming on his mobile phone while away in Canada. Prior to leaving, he rang Verizon to find out how much he would be charged per kilobyte for data access. They quoted him 0.002 cents per kilobyte.

However, when he received the bill, he had been charged 0.002 dollars per kilobyte. Every time he asked them to do the calulation they were multiplying 0.002 cents per kilobyte by the 35893 kilobytes, but then not reading it as cents, because it was displayed as 71.79 which looks like a dollars and cents figure.

It's not that they charged him the wrong amount (they didn't), but that they originally quoted him the wrong figure (which affected how he used his phone), and two managers, who work with numbers as part of their jobs, couldn't understand the difference.