You thought YOUR phone bill was huge...

[Thinking Aloud]

French phone bill waived after 12qn-euro blunder

A woman in south-west France, who received a telephone bill of nearly 12 quadrillion euros, has had the real amount she owed waived - after the company admitted its mistake.

Solenne San Jose, from Pessac outside Bordeaux, said she received a huge shock when she opened the bill for 11,721,000,000,000,000 euros (£9.4qn).

This is nearly 6,000 times France's annual economic output.

She had requested her account be closed after losing her job last month.

The former teaching assistant said she "almost had a heart attack. There were so many zeroes I couldn't even work out how much it was".

The phone company, Bouygues Telecom, initially told her there was nothing they could do to amend the computer-generated statement and later offered to set up instalments to pay off the bill.

In the end, the company admitted the bill should have been for 117.21 euros only, and eventually waived it altogether.

It has also apologised for the gaffe, which it says was down to a printing error and a subsequent misunderstanding between the client and staff at their call centre.

My emphasis.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19908095

[rasetsu]

How much is that in real money?

[Thinking Aloud]

£9,468,223,633,000,000

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

$15,199,792,969,000,000

[FBM]

Fuck. The monthly installment would be more than I've earned in my lifetime.

[klr]

What I can never understand is why the initial reaction of the company in these situations is always to deny the problem/wash its hands. It's so obviously a mega-SNAFU that the default response should be "yes, it's obviously wrong, it's our fault, hold on while we sort it out".

To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer. To go one better requires outsourced call centre/IT staff, cloud computing, etc.

[Feck]

I've had letter threatening court action for an unpaid bill of £0.01 before

[Thinking Aloud]

I've had letter threatening court action for an unpaid bill of £0.01 before

I was fined £16 for not paying 56p. Must do something about that, especially since the 56p was a charge for something I didn't receive.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

She should use this bank.
http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=34757

[rasetsu]

What I can never understand is why the initial reaction of the company in these situations is always to deny the problem/wash its hands. It's so obviously a mega-SNAFU that the default response should be "yes, it's obviously wrong, it's our fault, hold on while we sort it out".

To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer. To go one better requires outsourced call centre/IT staff, cloud computing, etc.

The expedient of human psychology. A sufficient number of people in such situation will simply accept the unspoken authority of the answer giver, and consider it, if not final, of sufficiently significant opposition (you versus an impersonal and wealthy conglomerate) that the person has an excellent chance of using their pocket change to buy a gun (or a rutabaga) and blowing their own brains out. End of problem. Such people are often frequently promoted to middle management where they spend their days overseeing the development of programs to teach front line employees to give this response. It's a form of evolution applied to a corporate organism. What works gets promoted, and becomes institutionalized. (And then there's the gerrymandering of the human spirit which is accomplished by directives from legal.)

There's a logical explanation for everything. You just need to know where to look.