Sunday, March 22, 2009

The difference between $.002 and .002cents

If you have a while to listen to this you might get a kick (or very, very frustrated) by it.

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/

2 comments:

  1. 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:

    http://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)

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  2. If you want to use the audio clip in your classroom I have an mp3 that I copied off of the internet.
    http://garsia.math.yorku.ca/~zabrocki/centsvsdollars.mp3

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