http://media.putfile.com/Verizon-Bad-Math
A Verizon customer tries to convince several supervisors at Verizon that .002 cents/per kilobyte is not the same as .002 dollars/per kilobyte. I think that he explains it very well. Apparently everyone at the Verizon office gets these two things confused and refused to even admit that there is a mistake.
At some point they started quoting "$0.002 per KB or $2.05 per MB" which is correct. Their employees read "$0.002 per KB" as ".002 cents per kilobyte" which is not correct. Where does this confusion come from?
I found this after reading http://xkcd.com/558/
After listening to this INCREDIBLY frustrating audio clip, I wanted to know how it ended, so I followed some of the commments and found George's blog. Apparently they eventually refunded his money, but won't do the same for somebody else with the EXACT same situation. Here's a link to his blog, with all of the back-and-forth:
ReplyDeletehttp://verizonmath.blogspot.com/
(keep in mind I only had time to do this because I'm trying to find things to do other than mark tests ... it's one of those days)
If you want to use the audio clip in your classroom I have an mp3 that I copied off of the internet.
ReplyDeletehttp://garsia.math.yorku.ca/~zabrocki/centsvsdollars.mp3