George, I feel your pain.

George Vaccaro's blog will resonate with anyone who has ever had a billing issue with a big telecom. George was quoted a roaming rate of .002 cents/kB of data by Verizon, but was billed at $.002. It's the difference between $71 and $0.71. After trying to teach basic math over the phone to increasingly senior Verizon employees he gave up and posted a recording of his conversation which seems to have helped in greasing the wheels: Verizon offered him a 50% refund the next day, then offered the full refund two days after that. 


Here's an excerpt of the conversation. George is speaking to Andrea, a Verizon floor manager:

A: I'm sorry that you um, already talked to a few different people here..

G: ...Let me cut to the chase.. Well

A: ...and they've all explained to you that you're being billed .002 cents, and if you take...

G: I'm not being billed...

A: ...and put it on your calculator.. it shows you that..

G: No it doesn't, I can do...

A: We never said that you're gonna get billed .00002 cents.

G: That's right, you said I was gonna get billed .002 cents per kilobyte, and I'd be happy to pay that. Now, why don't you bring up your calculator?

A: .002 cents, yeah.

G: Take .002, and we're talkin' about cents, right?

A: Right, .002, and if we multiply that by the amount of kilobyte usage that you have...

G: 35,893.

A: ...35,893, that comes out to what you paid, $71.79.

G: Cents. You never did the conversion from cents to dollars.

A: Cuz we're talkin' about cents, we're gonna multiply the amount of cents by the amount of kilobytes that you used...

G: Okay, ya know, ok... 

There's 27 minutes of this pure gold, and George is a lot more patient than I am. I'm impressed that he got a solution in three days. When we had a billing issue with Bell it took us months to (almost) sort out. I explain that one in a separate post.