The fact that he went from CSR to Supervisor to Floor manager bugs me. He was explaining it in perfect english and they just didn’t understand.
i will pay .02 …
Who doesn’t think that is 2 cents? I guess this guy thinks that might mean .02 million dollars!!! When you see .002 it is implied, $.002. The base measurement is always in dollars, he is just being a semantic loving little bitch and mad that his being an asshole is coming back to bite him in the ass. The consumerist should do articles about wacky typos in forums and how they nail the customer rep over it!
chet
As someone who understands basic math, I am endlessly perplexed by the complete lack of mathematical knowledge in the general population. When Jeopardy has math questions they’re things like grade 8 level geometry, whereas their American history questions are “Which US president always wished he’d been a vaudville star and never told anyone?” And people get the latter question right and the math questions wrong.
Did you listen to more than the first minute? Even the guy he’s talking to after he’s already been charged $0.002 repeatedly quotes him 0.002¢ as the price. He said he asked a CSR what the rate was, and was quoted 0.002¢. Presumably he never saw it written down.
But it is semantic bullshit and he knows the normal usage, he just thinks being a smarty instead of reasonable will win the day. That is why he told the first rep to write it down in notes. He knew this was bullshit wordplay fucking with people not used to working in tiny amounts, so much like you call something half a cent, they are covering this in the same manner, anything less than a dollar = cents.
He would have never asked them to write it down if he didn’t realize then he was going to play this game and then throw it back in their face HA HA! I am smarter than you.
Which in fact he disproves very quickly. He isn’t very smart. A smart person would have understood the context and how to communicate with other people.
Chet
There’s no implication of dollars when he was explicitly quoted .002 cents. Not just once but several times by several people. That’s crazy-talk.
And despite Chet’s vehemence, there’s exactly zero context to know that $0.015/kB is the proper price instead of $0.00015/kB. 1.5 cents per kilobyte is a stupidly expensive rate for data transfer, frankly.
Again, if he thought for a second the price he was getting them to say was the actual price, he never would have made them write it down in the notes. He just would have accepted it.
If someone said that arcade game costs .50 cents, would you know what they are taking about or would you claim it cost 1/2 a cent?
Chet
Uhm, but .5 cents is half a cent. If they wanted to say it was 50 cents, they should have said 50 cents. Not point 50 cents. That’s just how it is.
What are you talking about? They quoted him a price, he went off and used the service, got a bill that was 100 times what he was expecting. Then he called customer service and got trapped in a world where math doesn’t exist.
AIRPLANES ROLLERS BOY IN WINDOW
Chet, you’re so far out in left field on this one I’m wondering whether you hit your head against the wall :)
(I mean that light-heartedly)
Also he wasn’t even arguing that they billed him incorrectly, he said several times, “You misquoted the rate and I realize that now that I have my bill.”
Jakub, so why on his first call asking about the rates did he have them write down the amount in the notes? If he really thought that was the standard rate, why would it need to be in the notes?
Why are you even giving a shit about this? I’m not sure why you’re so worried about him trying to screw a company, when the entire point of this audio as far as I can tell is to show how patently stupid customer support is.
I think you’re wrong, but I have better things to do than argue about something like this :)
Because it’s a weird way to express it and he’s worried they will indulge in wordplay to change a rate after the fact.
Do you feel Verizon should be prohibited from entering into contracts which specify rates in fractions of a cent?
While this isn’t how I choose to negotiate things, if the rate is specified with precision, Verizon can’t bind someone to a contract other than the one agreed to because they failed to hire workers who understand decimal places.
Yet here you are!
Well the funniest thing to me - have you ever entered into a verbal contract with a cell phone company? And rate plans are pretty clear on their site $.002
This guy wanted to fuck with verizon, so he played this game - look how smart i am , look how dumb you are… but who is the dummy paying for all that data usage?
So argue all you want that Verizon is the stupid ones in this argument, but at the end of the day, he lost because he just wanted to be a little smart bitch instead of a regular person. Which again, his telling them to write it down in the notes clearly shows he knew he was playing this game at that time.
chet
Err… also because he probably hoped that on paper someone would see the difference between:
$0.015 and $0.00015
Seems pretty friggin’ obvious when you write it out. It’s not like you can just go through life blithely substituting dollar signs for cent signs. (Yes, I’d like that beamer there… the one that’s 29,995.95 cents pleas. I’ll be paying cash, just let me get the three hundred dollar bills out of my wallet real quickly here.)