VerizonMath is the story of one man's battle to resolve a Verizon screw up in quoting data usage fees as "point zero zero two cents per kilo byte" instead of "point zero zero two dollars per kilo byte". This caused him to run up a $71 data roaming charge instead of what he expected $0.71 or 71 cents.

George Vaccaro posts both emails and an audio recording of his dealings with Verizon and it is pretty stunning how much work (and patience) it took for him to eventually get this resolved. After initially being offered a 50% refund, he was finally given a full 100% refund but without any admission of error but he boldly went on to extract an admission of error and that they will revise customer service material. But wait there is more... days later they are still misquoting the rate in cents per kb instead of dollars per kb. Inspite of George's resolution and the publicity it gained, weeks later another person who had the identical problem has yet to get a refund.

I love the way this thread is going - I wish more people had the time and energy to follow through like George. It looks to me that well dugg stories and YouTube postings have true potential in getting exposure - and the irony of hearing the "this call may be recorded for training purposes" notification is so thick its probably lost on Verizon. Hearing two reps agree there is a difference between a dollar and a cent, and a half a dollar and half a cent but there is no difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents - well that's just priceless.

After reading and hearing all the recordings I start wondering "what if everyone starts doing the same thing as George?". How long will it be before it is just one deafening cacophony of complaints out there on the web with no specific action being taken? And how long before companies start trying to counter such trends with threats of legal action when customers post records of their reps and post emails from them? I know that ultimately that kind of thing will fail because it will backfire (blowback?) too badly - but it could get ugly for a while.

A few other comments on this:

1. I know being a CS rep must suck - I know someone who deals face to face with customers day in and day out and there are some real stinkers out there, over them phone it is even easier to get nasty. That is why I try really hard to be very courteous and patient with customer service people even when I'm near my wits end because they probably are as well. It usually pays off as my many (eventual) success stories with T-Mobile customer service have shown. It is frustrating that you sometimes do have to waste hours of your time and energy to get resolution. If we all calculated the value of our own "free time" on the phone in dollars per hour most people would give up long before resolution, it is simply not economic unless you're trying to get big bucks refunded.

2. I'm almost certain I got a similar misquote of data roaming rate from T-Mobile when I recently enquired about using it when traveling to the United Kingdom. When I went there two years ago it was completely free - part of my US unlimited plan, this time I think I got the point zero zero two cents per kb. I need to go back and check - if they haven't already wised up to Verizon's errors.

3. All this could be avoided if companies would only quote prices in dollars. But, as someone pointed out in one of the blog comments: many people just aren't comfortable with fractions of a dollar so that isn't going to happen.

4. But hello... being unable to distinguish a fraction of a dollar from a fraction of a cent - is it just too much to expect from people educated in "the worlds only superpower"? Vaccaro wasn't talking to uneducated or foreign nationals who might have a language problem, they could clearly hold and follow an English conversation, use a calculator, distinguish a dollar form a cent. So just what is going on with the education system and powers of reasoning in this country?

The inability of the two (and presumably several previous) people to make the cognitive leap and see and agree there was a problem is a striking demonstration of how ill equipped the average person now seems to be to make rational choices and process really, really simple mathematical concepts. Just how can we expect anyone to do anything as complicated as balance and weigh stuff like economic or scientific data when reasoning about which president to elect?

I start to wonder if it was an inability to doubt the corporate info or the computer that caused the reps inability recognize the error, or if it was a true failure of basic math because they don't understand how to use decimals and units in calculations? Obviously someone at Verizon eventually figured it out - was it because they were a) smarter or b) incentivised to (i.e. they realized it would cost too much not to figure it out).

5. Don't get me started on mass confusion that exists over if or when 1k is 1024 or 1000 and if a kb = kilo bit or kilo byte.

6. My inner conspiracy theorist would say that Verizon manufactured this whole thing and deliberately and rigorously trained their staff to confound and dumbfound people like George while secretly they busting a gut trying not to laugh at how hard the customer tries to explain the problem to them.

Sometimes you really need a contrary opinion which requires a contrarian which leads us straight to the door of Christopher Hitchens. So who better to dish the dirt on Gerald Ford in his Slate article The Ugly Truth about Gerald Ford". As he sums up:

To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again.

The Ford epoch did not banish a nightmare. It ended a dream - the ideal of equal justice under the law that would extend to a crooked and venal president. And in Iraq and Indonesia and Indochina, it either protracted existing nightmares or gave birth to new ones.