Tuesday, December 12, 2006

It's the end of the world as we know it

I stumbled upon this while going through some of the new sites at YTMND--it's several days old, which means my online sources have failed me!

It's a phone recording between a Verizon Wireless customer and Verizon's customer service supervisor, and said supervisor's floor manager. You can read about the whole ordeal on the blog he set up after the call, VerizonMath. Looks like Verizon has finally resolved the issue.

Cliff's Notes on what happened:

Guy is going to Canada, and called Verizon to see what their Internet rate would be.
Verizon rep tells him it's ".002 cents per kilobyte."
Guy gets bill, and finds they've charged him ".002 dollars per kilobyte."
Guy calls Verizon again, but no one seems to understand the difference.

That's the gist of it. If you don't have the time to listen to the whole thing, you can also get a really condensed version here (it's the YTMND site I mentioned).

It's incredible how Verizon's CSRs can't seem to comprehend grade-school math. Maybe they've become too reliant upon calculators and computers (The problem, of course, was that they let the calculator do all of the work for them, but the calculator can't keep track of your units, so when they pressed the equals button, they just assumed that the answer would be a dollar figure, when in fact they haven't done the conversion from cents to dollar yet). I guess if too many idiots rely on machines to do things for them, our civilizations will decline and decay, and morons will rule the earth.

Below is a simple conversion chart to illustrate how the math should be done, if you're the sort that has problems with keeping units straight.

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