That Verizon call is terrifying. The caller made a critical mistake a couple of times though, he asked for his bill in dollars. He should have asked them to, starting blank, calculate how many cents he owed them. I think that may have potentially clarified it for them. (I still don’t understand how they can continue to fail at this for some long though).
A big contributor is the fact that $ signs (or £ or whatever) go at the beginning of numbers, when every other unit goes at the end. If we were used to prices like 100$, or 0.99$ or whatever then they would have immediately seen that 0.002c was different from 0.002$. (But in their head it was $0.002c). So, the real culprit is inconsistent notation.
That Verizon call is terrifying. The caller made a critical mistake a couple of times though, he asked for his bill in dollars. He should have asked them to, starting blank, calculate how many cents he owed them. I think that may have potentially clarified it for them. (I still don’t understand how they can continue to fail at this for some long though).
A big contributor is the fact that $ signs (or £ or whatever) go at the beginning of numbers, when every other unit goes at the end. If we were used to prices like 100$, or 0.99$ or whatever then they would have immediately seen that 0.002c was different from 0.002$. (But in their head it was $0.002c). So, the real culprit is inconsistent notation.