Listen to Dollars and Cents by Verizon Math

[neutrino]

Listen to it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp0HyxQv97Q&eurl=

Background:http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/

 

[Ivan Seeking]

He's as much of the problem as they are. He keeps worrying about irrelevant examples that only confused everyone. They are quoting cents! They keep saying that. But he kept focusing on the quote when he should have been focusing on the bill.

Of course, the folks at Verizon are complete idiots! Incredible!

 

[0rthodontist]

Just incredible. Though I think the supervisor was being deliberately dense after a while. I mean, he can't agree to bill the guy 72 cents (at least not without a legal battle) and he can't deviate from the quotes that he and all his employees have been giving out, so he just sticks to the quotes and the price and pretends there is no conflict.

I had a math teacher once in middle school who ranted about this type of thing on supermarket prices for canned goods--she said she should toss the cashier a quarter and say "keep the change."

Edit: now I'm listening where he's talking to the other representative, and she actually seems clueless. The first guy seemed to get it after a while and then started faking it, but she is not getting it at all.

If I were the guy, I'd try to ask the following questions:
"What would my bill be if the rate were 1 cents/kb?"
"What would my bill be if the rate were 1.002 cents/kb?"

Chances are low that the rep would be able or willing to answer, but working with the 1.002 cents would at least force them to treat the .002 as a cent figure, not a dollar figure. Then you might try to ask them to subtract one from the other, though chances of that succeeding are pretty low.

I wonder what the consequences could be if this guy pursues this in court with other people who were quoted the same figure.

 

[BobG]

Their rate's listed at $.002/KB now. On the other hand, 'Unlimited' = 5 GB/mo.

http://www.hp.com/sbso/wireless/MNY50079-VZAccessPricing-V1b.pdf

Yeah, I think the first guy realized the caller was right, but there's no way for him to resolve the issue. His only options are to accept payment of $71.79 or bump it up to his supervisor. I think the concept honestly was beyond the second person.

Edit: In fact, if a person used his 5GB per month, they'd be paying about .0012 cents per kilobyte, which would make .002 cents per kilobyte for roaming charges at least seem somewhat reasonable (I think roaming charges normally charge at more than just double the normal rate for most things, though). However, the average user evidently only uses about 8.3 MB per day (per Verizon), which would be a charge of about .024 cents/kilobyte. Verizon Limits Its "Unlimited" Wireless Broadband Service.

Sometimes it amazes me how mechanical and bureaucratic people can be about these types of things. Several years ago, when stamps were still around 29 cents, I received a bill from our dentist. Being a small office, the bills were always handwritten and the person had particularly rounded 6's - unless you actually compared the 6's to the 0's, you wouldn't know they were 6's. If you didn't pay attention, it was easy to mistake a 6 for a zero, so I underpaid my bill by $.60. A month later, I got another bill and my first thought was they were sending me a bill for $0.00 so I would know for sure my charges were all paid. The second month I received a bill, I realized they were billing me $0.60. I thought about waiting one more month just to be obnoxious, but decided I should probably go ahead and pay it ... with a check and with a 29 cent stamp. At least the post office was happy.

 

[DaveC426913]

Ivan's right, this would have been much clearer and much shorter, if he had just had them calculate what his bill should be.

Get the guy to say you are charged at .002c/kb, then ask him to calculate his bill.

3.5Gb x .002c = 71 cents.

Forget all the hypothetical stuff.

 

[0rthodontist]

He did try that a lot. The reps either couldn't do or refused to do the units arithmetic, telling him that his kb usage x .002 cents/kb is "72" when they do it on their calculator, and insisting it's 72 "dollars" when he asked for the units.

 

[dontdisturbmycircles]

So very very sad...

The caller is blatantly trying to complicate things, but still. My oh my.

edit: On second thought, I would have to say that most people would be able to grasp this... I would be hard pressed to simplify it lol

 

[dontdisturbmycircles]

I am listening to the female now, holllly craaaaap.

 

[Gokul43201]

Ivan's right, this would have been much clearer and much shorter, if he had just had them calculate what his bill should be.

Get the guy to say you are charged at .002c/kb, then ask him to calculate his bill.

3.5Gb x .002c = 71 cents.

Forget all the hypothetical stuff.

This is EXACTLY what the guy did, like a billion times! He made them multiply 0.002c/kB ("keep in mind that's in units of cents") with 35,000 kB...and they'd say it came out 71 dollars! Incredible! The mind boggles! No, it actually does a lot more than that, but I haven't found the words for it yet!

What a complete bunch of morons! The guy was plenty clear - not clear enough for a class of slow 3rd graders, maybe! What kind of grammar school dropouts does Verizon hire??!

The manager: "I'm sorry, I'm not a mathematician"!

No kidding?!

 

[dontdisturbmycircles]

Haha Gokul that quote was hillarious.

 

[leright]

dammit, I was just going to post this.

 

[0rthodontist]

I liked it most when the woman said "Well, I guess that's a matter of opinion."

 

[DeadWolfe]

The Verizon people were clearly feigning stupidity.

 

[brewnog]

Feel like banging your head against a wall?

I don't know how this guy has so much patience. I'd have driven round to the call centre and bashed them all with a maths stick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp0HyxQv97Q&eurl=

 

[brewnog]

Oopsie...

 

[brewnog]

"I'm not a mathematician, but I've got my calculator here..."

ARGHH!

 

[Gokul43201]

Verizon Still Can't Count - http://youtube.com/watch?v=wAVKOElCkz4&watch_response

 

[neutrino]

XKCD

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

3.5Gb x .002c = 71 cents.

I get 3.5Gb x .002c/Kb = 70 dollars. Are the inputs correct?

 

[BobG]

XKCD

That's priceless.

Or pretty close to $1.42

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Or pretty close to $1.42

Extremely close, but much closer to $.002

 

[FrogPad]

Extremely close, but much closer to $.002

you mean .002 ?

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

you mean .002 ?

The .002 part is handwritten, the dollars part is printed.

 

[BobG]

Extremely close, but much closer to $.002

Doh! I knew that! I didn't really think pi was 90 degrees!

 

[FrogPad]

The .002 part is handwritten, the dollars part is printed.

Wow you really know how to distinguish between dollars, cents, and unitless quanitities... you should definitely not work for Verizon

 

[MeJennifer]

Looks like it's closer to 0.7340.
1 Gigabyte is slightly more than 1 billion bytes. 1,073,741,824 bytes to be exact.

 

[LURCH]

Was it just me, or did you all find yourselves waiting for him to ask who was on First?

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Looks like it's closer to 0.7340.

0.7340 in what units?
3.5 Gb is 3670016 Kb.
3670016 Kb * .002 c/Kb = 7340c = $73.40 (roughly)
But I haven't got an anwer to the question "are these the correct inputs?"

 

[Moonbear]

0.7340 in what units?
3.5 Gb is 3670016 Kb.
3670016 Kb * .002 c/Kb = 7340c = $73.40 (roughly)
But I haven't got an anwer to the question "are these the correct inputs?"

Where are you getting 3.5 GB from? The bill, at least as far as we know, was in KB: 35893 KB.

If you read the comments on the various videos related to this, it makes you just want to bang your head on the wall or reach out and strangle these people and send them back to 4th grade! This is why units are SO important...all of them! He should have not just had them write down a bunch of numbers (it seemed like he was going out of his way to make it even more confusing by arguing over the difference between dollars and cents before ever getting to his actual problem).

What he needed to say was something like:
I was quoted a rate of .002 cents per KB.
I used 35893 KB.
If you multiply 35893 KB by .002 cents per KB, you get 71.786 cents. I'll agree to that rounding up to 72 cents, but not 71 dollars!

As soon as the idiot on the other end of the phone started trying to say .002 dollars is the same as .002 cents, I wouldn't have kept belaboring the point, I'd have simply requested to please be connected to a supervisor who has passed grade school math.

 

[Evo]

Where are you getting 3.5 GB from? The bill, at least as far as we know, was in KB: 35893 KB.

If you read the comments on the various videos related to this, it makes you just want to bang your head on the wall or reach out and strangle these people and send them back to 4th grade! This is why units are SO important...all of them! He should have not just had them write down a bunch of numbers (it seemed like he was going out of his way to make it even more confusing by arguing over the difference between dollars and cents before ever getting to his actual problem).

What he needed to say was something like:
I was quoted a rate of .002 cents per KB.
I used 35893 KB.
If you multiply 35893 KB by .002 cents per KB, you get 71.786 cents. I'll agree to that rounding up to 72 cents, but not 71 dollars!

As soon as the idiot on the other end of the phone started trying to say .002 dollars is the same as .002 cents, I wouldn't have kept belaboring the point, I'd have simply requested to please be connected to a supervisor who has passed grade school math.

This is how it is actually taught to them at these companies. They are taught to quote anything to the right of a decimal point in cents. For example, a per minute rate of 1 and 1/2 cents is 0.015 they'll quote this to the customer as .015 cents, when it's actually 1.5 cents they forget to move the decimal point over. He should have been quoted .2 cents.

Added bonus information (you can all send me chocolates) I had to find an example to send a client that couldn't uinderstand why I was telling him that for data transfer we calculated 1 megabyte as 1,000 kilobytes. He called me back 3 times saying his boss said I was wrong. I finally found this article to send him since he wouldn't take my word on it.

This part most people know:

Definition: A kilobyte equals 1024 bytes. Likewise, a megabyte (MB) equals 1024 Kilobytes and a gigabyte (GB) equals 1024 MB.

Except when you get into the world of data communications (like cell phone data usage). We calculate data transfer rates differently as kilobytes per second (KBps), or megabytes per second (MBps).

"The meaning of the words kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte change when they are used in the context of network data rates. A rate of one kilobyte per second (KBps) equals 1000 (not 1024) bytes per second. One megabyte per second (MBps) equals one million bytes per second (not 1,048,576 bytes). One gigabyte per second (GBps) equals one billion bytes per second."

http://compnetworking.about.com/od/basiccomputerarchitecture/l/bldef_kbyte.htm

It is very important that KB or MB or GB are capitalized to represent bytes, not bits. I am constantly calling our rate people when they send out a pricing showing kbps when it should read KBps, HUGE DIFFERENCE, and they don't even know they've made a mistake because they just do pricing, they don't undestand data.

 

[neutrino]

And now, he has put up a t-shirt designing contest with a few prizes, including a cash prize of seventy one DOLLARS and seventy nine CENTS...
http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/t-shirt-design-and-remix-competitions.html

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Where are you getting 3.5 GB from?

From DaveC426913's message #5 in this thread. I quoted his post in my first post in message #19 and I kept asking: Are these inputs correct? You are the first one to set me straight.