Sometimes you get your cell phone bill through and it might seem a little more than what you’d been expecting, but what the heck, you pay it.
However, Solenne San Jose, from the French city of Bordeaux, would’ve been hard pressed to do such a thing as her bill was a lot, lot more than she’d been expecting. In fact, it had so many zeros on it that she didn’t even know how to say it.
San Jose had decided to pull out of her phone contract early and as a result was told by her carrier she’d have to pay a termination fee that would be included in her final bill which would be sent in the mail.
Upon opening the bill and seeing the final fee, San Jose said she “nearly had a heart attack.” Why? Because it was for €11,721,000,000,000,000 (about $15 quadrillion), that’s why.
Receiving a phone bill more than 5,000 times greater than the gross domestic product of the country in which you live is really no way to start the day, so San Jose called the company, Bouygues Telecom, to suggest there’d been some kind of mistake in an effort to get it to cancel the charge made to her bank account.
But this is where things got really absurd. On her first attempt to sort the problem out, she was reportedly told that nothing could be done, and informed that “it’s calculated automatically.”
Another person at the company said someone would be in touch to sort out paying the amount in instalments. Eventually, an employee with some common sense realized a mistake had been made. The real bill? €117 ($151).
The company have reportedly said sorry for the error and told San Jose she won’t have to pay anything at all. With the stress and hassle it must have caused, however, you might think it could’ve offered a more generous apology – a mistakenly written check for a couple of quadrillion dollars would’ve been nice.
[Sud Quest via Technorati] [Top image: JeniFoto / Featured: marcogarrincha / Shutterstock]
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Must’ve been a shocker. Lol
Close enough.
Haha, I wouldn’t know how to react if I’ve seen this on my bill!
Gotta
Must’ve been a shocker. Lol
-The figures are calculated automatically, so theres been a software problem
-employees are just working for themselves, getting rid of the problem, no solution to the customer
-”Pay in instalments”, ug!!! Maybe in some million years……
Obviously a mistake i don’t understand why and it’s scary that the employees didn’t figure that out on the first try.
Did the guy typing her bill have a brief nap attack whilst entering the zeroes?
I am french and when i read this, I have just one thing that came to my mind “f….ing ass…les of employee that wanted her to pay her bill in instalments. Sometimes people have no common sense.
Totally heartless and very dumb haha.
Good thing France has universal healthcare. It would given me a heart attack and my insurance probably wouldn’t cover it.
And I love the phone company’s very generous offer to let her pay in installments.
Best Fail of the day.
Haha goes not sure what that says about the operator….I’m afraid to say it. But really, where is the common sense?
Common sense:
So rare that it’s a Super Power!