Verizon’s Bad Math
Last year I hired a man to install a rock wall in my front yard. It would be about a foot high and a foot wide and 75 feet long. I asked him for a price. He quoted me $6 per foot. I did the math quickly in my head, came up with $450, and I shook his hand. It seemed like a good rate and he seemed like an honest guy.
When he was finished I wrote him a check. He told me I owed him much more than the check. In fact, he said, I owed him $1300+. I explained to him how $6 times 75 feet is $450. He thought about this for a long while. Then he said, “See, you’re paying me for the 75 feet long. But you’re forgetting about the 75 feet tall, and the 75 feet front to back.”
I assumed he was wanting to charge me per cubic foot. But he actually wanted to charge me per square foot of surface area! It was crazy. I explained it all to him in elaborate detail about how his math was off. I showed him how he had misquoted his rate to begin with. But I never could dissuade him of the notion that $6/foot is the same as $18/cubic foot.
I could forgive the poor, uneducated rocklayer for not understanding volumetric math. But George Vaccaro had a similar conversation with Verizon last week. It seems they are quoting their data bandwidth rates as “point zero zero two cents per kilobyte,” but what they meant to say, was “point zero zero two dollars per kilobyte,” or $0.002 per kb.
What is so extremely laughable is that George recorded the phone conversation he had with all the CSRs, right up to the floor manager, and they all can’t understand his beef and how the rate they quoted was wrong! Is math really this hard?