Why I Never Have Been or Never Will Be a Verizon Wireless Customer

I'll start off with a little math lesson for y'all. Bear with me, it's easy fourth grade math.

OK...

Multiply .002 by 35893...you get 71.786.

OK...

Now what if I tell you that the .002 is cents and the 35893 is a data measurement of kilobytes. This would mean that the resulting product of .002 and 35893 is 71.786 cents per kilobyte.

OK...

What would 71.786 cents be in dollars?

This is simple math as well...

Divide 71.786 by 100 because there are 100 pennies in one dollar.

The resulting quotient is .71786 cents or $.71786. See the decimal point in front of the numbers? Do not be confused by the dollar sign...that is simply a semantic of the US monetary system.

OK...everyone got that little math problem?

Can anyone tell me how not one, not two, not even three, but several grown adults cannot figure that simple math problem? With several simple examples to help out the reasoning? My favorite...if you sold your car to me for $20,000 (dollars) and I brought you 20,000 pennies for the sale of the car, you would tell me to go F--- myself.

Listen to this audio of George Vaccaro's call to the Verizon Wireless Customer Service center.
http://xkcd.com/verizon/
I have to warn you, it's painful, you will want to throw your computer, you will want to beat the reps over their heads several times with your keyboard, you will want to scream at the monitor It's fourth grade math, you nut f*cks!! It's not that difficult! Google it for Christsake!!
At least that's what I wanted to do while listening to a very patient George try to reason with the idiotic people on the phone.

You can find George's blog here. The trouble this poor guy had to go through, and is still dealing with as far as I can tell, is so absolutely frustrating and insanely stupid that you can't help feel hopelessly sorry for him. I mean if they can't do simple math what the hell else are they messing up on people's bills?

My head seriously hurt after listening to the MP3 and reading George's blog about this. It's one of those things where you shake your head and say, "Oh...my...God." All the while dumbfounded at the idea that it's possible to think that .002 cents is the same as .002 dollars.

George isn't the only person to have suffered from the complete incompetency of the CSR department of Verizon Wireless. Peter writes this about his experience with the Verizon CSR department.

Unbelievable that these people really think that .015 dollars is the exact same amount as .015 cents!! Maybe those shows like Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? are onto something...

I understand that what the CSR department should be saying is .015 dollars per kilobyte, but that is not what they are saying! $.015 would equate to point-zero-one-five dollars per kilobyte in words, not point-zero-one-five cents per kilobyte. And just to reiterate the fact that they are still getting the rate quote wrong on the phone, I called the 1-800 number for Verizon and specifically asked for the data rate for cell phone coverage in Canada and the CSR said point-zero-zero-two per kilobytes. When I asked point-zero-zero-two what per kilobyte, she responded with point-zero-zero-two cents per kilobyte!

Holy cow, save us from the idiots!