Many people are still idiots
In keeping with the general theme that lots of people seem to be idiots these days, I just found an excellent blog that I wish I’d heard about months ago. This guy has been chronicling how Verizon employees don’t know the difference between dollars and cents. Literally. The short version is as follows: when he signed up for their data transfer service, he was told by 3 different salespeople that he would be charged 0.002 cents per kilobyte, and got them to put that in writing in their records of his service. He was subsequently charged 0.002 dollars per kilobyte, and went through 4 customer service representatives, including a supervisor and a floor manager, without finding anyone who understood the difference between the two. Thankfully, he eventually got someone higher up to realize the mistake and reverse the charges on his bill.
He also links to the story of another person who had pretty much the same thing happen to them, though they haven’t gotten the charges reversed yet. The audio (embedded as a YouTube “movie”) is amazingly exasperating: it basically comes down to the customer service people agreeing that there is a difference between 2 dollars and 2 cents, but that 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents are the same. This story has apparently appeared on all sorts of news/blog/&c outlets. Verizon has subsequently “changed” their rates from $0.002/kB to $2.05/MB.
I remember hearing about this a few months ago. I only listened to part of the audio here but I was pretty amazed when the verizon people said something like “we are just going to have to agree to disagree.”
I remember listening to that and trying to figure out how I would better explain it.
I think that to make things right, the costumer should have told the Verizon employees to say PENNIES every time they would say CENTS.
“How much does a kilobyte cost me?”
“.001 pennies, sir. Oh, yeah. I’m an idiot.”
For completeness, I should mention a theory I read that makes a lot of sense: the customer service people aren’t stupid, and they understand the mistake. However, they’re afraid of admitting this, because then many, many more customers will call in with the same claim, and Verizon’s earnings will shrink a hundredfold. It’s much easier (but much more cowardly) to pretend not to understand than to admit that the company should refund your (and possibly everyone else’s) money, potentially losing the company millions of dollars.
At least with this interpretation, Verizon is full of competent (though despicably cowardly) employees.
I’m glad to see the “&c” usage; people always look at me funny for that.
You’re the only other person I know who uses it, but I like it enough to try to spread the good word, so to speak.
I’m not sure if you remember the crossword puzzle we did in Pittsburgh, but this spelling would totally have come in handy then. Come to think of it, I’m not sure why I even remember that crossword. The title of the puzzle was something like “A Common Symbol Will Help You” and half a dozen of the “letters” in the solution were supposed to be apersands. For instance, one of the 4-letter clues was “The eagle has ____” and its answer was L&ED. We worked on that thing at every meal for a whole day before figuring out those ampersands.