December 10, 2006

Verizon CSRs confused by math(s) [embedded MP3 audio] George (no relation to Curious) recently had it out with Verizon over his internet bill; they claimed that quoting the price of 0.002 cents per kilobyte of data transfer was the same as billing for 0.002 dollars per KB. He disagreed, and taped the phone conversation to make sure he wasn't the only one.

According to the blog George put up to document the whole mess, Verizon has since been in contact and offered to credit him half of the $72 amount. That's nice, but misses the principle of the thing, and doesn't lessen the sting of having proof that your Customer Service Reps lack some very basic math(s) skills. It's obviously reminiscent of Vincent Ferrari and his infamous AOL account-cancellation call, but I think more is at work here than just pretending to be shocked that telcos are out to screw over whomever they can. Is it reasonable to expect that someone working at a call-centre is going to be math literate, and if so, to what degree? Math anxiety is quite common, to the point that being "no good at math(s)" is sometimes a badge of pride. So freezing up over the phone when confronted by a customer who wields phrases like "two one thousanths" and "a-hundred fold" can perhaps be forgiven. But can it be so easy to allow for failing to even recognize that a mistake is being made at all? This might have already been done to death (on /., digg, and even elsewhere), but after reading some of the comments on the YouTube version and feeling my IQ drop a couple points with several dozen variations on lolol dumasses!!1, I thought it would be worth disturbing the Monkey population to raise the level of conversation. Or at least to solicit a few more laughs.

posted by peruvianllama 18 years ago
  • The confusion arrives from the fact that he is arguing the decimal as a placeholder for monetary designation and one used as a placeholder for percentages. George is just playing on something that people do not routinely think about. It is usually clear that a monetary designation followed by "cents" is pretty clear, has anyone seen a static monetary rate represented by a percentage. If VZ wanted to charge .00002 they would have put .00002, not as a percentage of a dollar but as a monetary designation. When I see ".05 cents" I know that means 5 cents, I don't think it means 5% of a nickel. These poor CSRs were just put on the spot on a stupid point. George is the stupid one here.
  • I kind of agree with glamajamma here. As ridiculous as the situation is, and as culpable as Verizon may be, George seems to have latched on to a technicality that really wouldn't have tripped up most people, and in some sense he's the one playing possum to Verizon's intended meaning. That said, those customer service calls are a severe test of one's patience and restraint, and reminds me of one my favorite quotes:
    Nothing gives a sense of infinity like stupidity.
  • Are you guys serious? I can see only one way of understanding 0.002 cents/kb. George got repeated confirmation from them that that is indeed exactly what they meant. How in the world is this just a stupid point? There's nothing about percentages involved.
  • Make no mistake, Verizon is clearly in the wrong, and those customer reps are clearly moronic company stooges. But while I won't go quite as far as glama in calling George stupid, I do think it's a case of George holding them to a colossal error that he clearly knows to be a case of miscommunication. It's not unlike finding a mis-tagged item in a supermarket and insisting on paying two cents for an item that you clearly know is two dollars. Is it the supermarket's fault? Of course it is. Does he have the right? Of course he does. Does it make him a hero and the supermarket an evil empire? No, it doesn't.
  • It's not unlike finding a mis-tagged item in a supermarket and insisting on paying two cents for an item that you clearly know is two dollars. George responds (at least partly) to your line of thought sly, in a post on his blog (third paragraph), by claiming that he has an unlimited plan in the States, and so has no concept for how much bandwidth usually costs. I don't necessarily dispute your point that he might be gaming the system, but it seems at least plausible that 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents sound equally reasonable while on a cell phone. To wit, a gaggle of Verizon employees couldn't tell the difference between the two! Hey! How many Verizon employees does it take to change a lightbulb make correct change? Er... ah... I guess, a gaggle. *cough*
  • I can see only one way of understanding 0.002 cents/kb. Ditto.
  • "When I see ".05 cents" I know that means 5 cents, I don't think it means 5% of a nickel." It means neither. It means 5% of a cent. If I go to a yard sale and an item is listed at ".25 cents," then I understand that item to actually cost 25 cents. If I have a multimillion dollar corporation quote me a rate of .002 cents and I ask several times for verification of that rate, then I expect the rate to be .002 cents.
  • George did all that could be reasonably expected. He owes Verizon $0.72 and no more.
  • Wow, that was frustrating on a couple levels. On one hand it was hard to listen to the verizon reps freezing up with a hole in their mind that they couldn't see. "I'm not a mathematician" made me sad. On the other hand, George seemed to just increase the anxiety. He was also frustrated, so I can understand. In the phone call, though, I don't think he actually went through the process of converting cents to dollars, which might not have helped, but it was a fundamental angle he missed. 0.002 cents/KB seems a little low to me and I don't even have a plan. One could look up some data rates to at least get an idea of the order of magnitude. George seems a little disingenuous here, but he is, after all, trying to get out of paying $71. Still, it comes down to what he was quoted on the phone, and many people will unfortunately read $0.002 as 0.002 cents. So George should only have to pay 72 cents, and Verizon needs to train their reps in basic numeracy, or failing that tell them to reference a website. from the blog: "I will be donating .999999% of all proceeds to a fund for the education of call center reps" Nice.
  • I like the rep towards the end: "Well, that's just your opinion..." I shoulda used that in engineering school! him: "Dude. Your math was wrong and your bridge fell over." me: "Well, that's just your opinion..." hehe Derail alert: This call reinforces the idea I have that the stuff learned in public, indeed college education just isn't used in real life by most people. I mean, this is 6th or 7th grade material. Consider if he had asked them to do some simple calculus, anything requiring sines or cosines, or even *gasp* long division. I mean, given your druthers, what would you really like to be good at in your daily life? Calculus? Or something else? Has your education addressed that.. at all??
  • Apart from entertainment value why are people doing such things on the telephone? I've never had a problem cancelling a service or getting a reliable explanation when I write a letter and have it delivered certified, return receipt requested. That is because a company can't ignore or refuse to honor something provably written and sent to their attention. If they do nothing, there's a presumption that your communication is right; if they reply, then you have a document you can take to court. If someone calls in response to a letter you sent them, you simply say "I won't discuss this except in writing". No company policy trumps law.
  • I could see where the customer service people could be otherwise smart people and get hung up on this math. *I'd* get hung up on it. But then again, I'm bad at numbers in general (the more I read about it, the more I think I might have a slight learning disability with numbers. I could read before I could count to ten). The more on-the-spot I'm made to feel, the worse I get with it.
  • Think what you will about this guy, a contract is a contract. Do any of you out there honestly think that if the situation were reversed that Verizon wouldn't have insisted that they only owed $0.72 instead of $72?
  • For anyone thinking he's just trying to game the system, I like this breakdown on Slashdot showing that .002 cents/kilobyte is not "outrageously cheap". "...think of it this way: the guy apparently downloaded 35893 kilobytes in a month. That's only ~36 megabytes - hardly anything! That's like downloading one album from the iTunes Music Store. And he was charged $72? No wonder he was mad."
  • I am pretty good at math, and if I was working at Verizon I could see myself missing the point of the argument, because the work is mind numbing. I have worked in a call center years ago, and it is really soul sucking work. When I did that crappy type of job, my mind was focused on getting the people off my phone and not on the placement of decimal points in money and percentages. In contrast George called with this formulated in his head, which gave him an unfair advantage. I think his condescending attitude is unwarranted. Sure we all have bad experiences from call reps, but that is hardly a reason to denigrate them as stupid. I still think he's dumb to think .002 means .2% of a penny versus 20% of a penny.
  • I still think he's dumb to think .002 means .2% of a penny versus 20% of a penny. 0.002 in the absence of a unit is just a number. 0.002 cents, the number he was quoted by Verizon, is 0.2% of a penny, while $0.002 is 20% of a penny. I'm confused why you keep calling him "dumb" for knowing the difference.
  • In any case, kilobyte is such a small amount of data these days that it's the equivalent of advertising voice calls by saying they cost 0.0001 cents per 10 milliseconds (or whatever).
  • Do you have an example where a portion of a static rate is represented by a percentage? I can't think of one, so why would this be any different. We use percentages in monetary situations to dynamically generate fees. Their fee situation doesn't require a dynamically created fee it is a flat static rate, so when they write .002 it is clearly implied $.oo2. My problem is not with the world play he generated from this cultural accepted norm, so much as the fact that he 1.) has convinced himself he is right. 2.) he thinks this sort of silliness has somehow given him better math skills over the CSRs, because this has nothing to do with math. If it was me, I would have credited him and explained to him the running rate as being $.002 and left it at that. As for this being an expensive rate for service, well most of these services will get you in the wallet for "extra services."
  • Ugh... they didn't write .002, they told him, on the phone, "zero point zero zero two cents per kilobyte," which is as different from "zero point zero zero two dollars per kilobyte" as "one cent per kilobyte" is from "one dollar per kilobyte". End of story.
  • At a local Barnes and Noble: Under a penny I didn't try buying any at the time.
  • Uh, what's next, the grocer's apostrophe is grammatically fine? Apple's are .99 cents per kilogram gram.
  • so Vin is that 99% of a penny? Does anyone else think thats 99% of a penny? This picture is a clear example of the same exact situation, and a clear example of norms in our culture.
  • glama: he thinks this sort of silliness has somehow given him better math skills over the CSRs, because this has nothing to do with math. Completely wrong: he asks the reps several times to multiply 35893 kilobytes by their stated rate of .002 cents/kb, at which point they randomly switch units to dollars. This is entirely a math problem.
  • Also, glama, this norm doesn't make any sense with fractions of cents. There's no way to interpret .002 as either dollars or cents, because as the manager points out, there's no such thing as .002 dollars.
  • To glama and in light of Vin Ethyl's photo: I understand and agree with completely the point made by the ".99 cent paperbacks" sign, and similar analogies to supermarket prices, etc. But though it is a common norm this is, it must be admitted, bad notation. The shopkeep is writing the value of the item in standard $dollars.cents notation; and then to emphasize the fact that the price is so low as to not even need to be measured in full dollars, the word "cent(s)" or the symbol ยข is appended to the number, instead of "dollars" or $. You are completely correct glama in saying that no-one would read this as being 99% of a penny, both because of context (no bookstore is going to charge in fractions of a cent) and because of the ubiquitous nature of this bad notation. In fact, take this fact a step further: no-one would read this as being 0.99 of a penny, and instead would read it as being 99 cents. So how would they read it out loud - as "0.99 cents" or "99 cents"? The (bad-but-accepted) standard for notation might be present on paper, but no such thing exists in spoken form. We're doubly at a loss in the world of online micro-payments, because charges of a fraction of a cent are entirely possible and so the cost's context isn't of any help. Indeed, the actual cost per KB was still a fraction of a cent ($0.002), albeit a much larger fraction. Another thought on why this notation is "bad" in the sense of consistency: how would we interpret it if the sign read "1.99 cent paperbacks"? What if we had no context of what the "usual" cost was for such a paperback?
  • so Vin is that 99% of a penny? That's what it says. But people put lots of things on signs that are different from what they intend. Verizon might have saved themselves some trouble by quoting the rate per millibyte (mb). Or not.
  • "Verizon might have saved themselves some trouble by quoting the rate per millibyte (mb). Or not." I had a thought along similar lines, that it would have been clearer to state that the price was 2 cents per 100KB, but that the charge would be evaluated for each KB. Sort of like interest at a bank, that's computed monthly but deposited annually, or whatever.
  • I think the whole argument is a fuzzy one, but the way he presents it he is making himself out to be the "smart" one here. There are a great deal of things I could bitch about dealing with stupid people, but I wouldn't say this was one of them.
  • Fact: The book sale sign reads ninety-nine one hundredths of a cent. If 99 cents was meant the decimal point wouldn't be there. Only necessary to say 99 cents. Or $0.99. In some jurisdictions I've lived in, a seller has legally to sell an item at its advertized price, even if an error's been made. A cent is one hundredth of a dollar. Just to muddy the waters further: 200 cents = $2.00. Two thousand cents = $20.00. And if each cent represented a year, then 2,000 cents would equal two millenia. And $20.01 would begin a third millenium. ;]
  • Imagine this conversation before the invention of zero.
  • And $20.01 would begin a third millenium. Nope. According to Zeno, the third millenium never begins, because you can take that decimal a lot further than just two places. And keep taking it, forever and ever. I'm really not a sophist though.
  • $20.01, a Space Odyssey.
  • Hi, f8x! Thought that might evoke a response. Good to see ye back! With respect to Achilles, I've never understood why, if we can hypothesize he goes a first half, trhen why not just hypothesize he can go the second half as well?
  • Well with Achilles the problem is more obvious; he can't make it to the halfway point because of that awful limp. Poor guy.
  • *realizes that he misinterpreted bees' meaning, making that last comment much less funny* *cues the pre-recorded laugh track*
  • Yeah, I think peruvianllama's point about context is spot on. It's obvious that a paperback novel wouldn't cost a fraction of a penny, that a house shouldn't cost $150 but $150k, but how much should a kB of wireless bandwidth "reasonably" cost? If I download a DVD worth of porn data, should that cost $92? or $9200?? Hell, the first looks high to me; the second just looks ridiculous, but that's how much Verizon is charging. The problem is there's enough variance in the market that either number is commonly correct. And, really, I don't think anything about downloading a few gigs anymore. Actually, I bet there have been cases where the Verizon customer expects to pay $50 and is shocked to get a bill for $5000 -- they just didn't record & distribute the conversation for us. I bet it happens a LOT. Reminds me of my high school physics teacher. If you gave him a unit-less answer, "53", he would ask, "53...chickens??"
  • Heh. It's easy to forget how fun it can be to vicariously experience someone else's existential hell. =D
  • The price per book is stated to be ninety-nine one hundredths of a cent. That is what the sign says. What might seem obvious to one person may not be nearly so obvious to another. Such differences make for horse races and also for court cases. So, setting aside the issue of taxes, what I would expect is that if I chose ten books, walk up to the register and give them a ten dollar bill, is that I will then receive ten cents in change. Courts tend to discourage false advertizing.
  • Not enough drunken bishops in this thread.
  • Alas. And pitiably true.
  • And yet, despite all the coverage, the price is still being quoted in cents...
  • Verizon is completely at fault here, it's silly to argue otherwise. I had no idea how much broadband would cost - and $2/MB is a ridiculously HIGH price to me. In the follow up to the most recent link, one of the reps actually said a couple of times that there were no additional charges to roam from Canada, but (after being prompted by the caller) then corrected herself and sensibly quoted the price as $2/MB.