Moonbear said:
Where are you getting 3.5 GB from? The bill, at least as far as we know, was in KB: 35893 KB.
If you read the comments on the various videos related to this, it makes you just want to bang your head on the wall or reach out and strangle these people and send them back to 4th grade! This is why units are SO important...all of them! He should have not just had them write down a bunch of numbers (it seemed like he was going out of his way to make it even more confusing by arguing over the difference between dollars and cents before ever getting to his actual problem).
What he needed to say was something like:
I was quoted a rate of .002 cents per KB.
I used 35893 KB.
If you multiply 35893 KB by .002 cents per KB, you get 71.786 cents. I'll agree to that rounding up to 72 cents, but not 71 dollars!
As soon as the idiot on the other end of the phone started trying to say .002 dollars is the same as .002 cents, I wouldn't have kept belaboring the point, I'd have simply requested to please be connected to a supervisor who has passed grade school math.
This is how it is actually taught to them at these companies. They are taught to quote anything to the right of a decimal point in cents.
For example, a per minute rate of 1 and 1/2 cents is 0.015 they'll quote this to the customer as .015 cents, when it's actually 1.5 cents they forget to move the decimal point over. He should have been quoted .2 cents.
Added bonus information (you can all send me chocolates) I had to find an example to send a client that couldn't uinderstand why I was telling him that for data transfer we calculated 1 megabyte as 1,000 kilobytes. He called me back 3 times saying his boss said I was wrong. I finally found this article to send him since he wouldn't take my word on it.
This part most people know:
Definition: A kilobyte equals 1024 bytes. Likewise, a megabyte (MB) equals 1024 Kilobytes and a gigabyte (GB) equals 1024 MB.
Except when you get into the world of data communications (like cell phone data usage). We calculate data transfer rates differently as kilobytes per second (KBps), or megabytes per second (MBps).
"The meaning of the words kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte change when they are used in the context of network data rates. A rate of one kilobyte per second (KBps) equals 1000 (not 1024) bytes per second. One megabyte per second (MBps) equals one million bytes per second (not 1,048,576 bytes). One gigabyte per second (GBps) equals one billion bytes per second."
http://compnetworking.about.com/od/basiccomputerarchitecture/l/bldef_kbyte.htm
It is very important that KB or MB or GB are capitalized to represent bytes, not bits. I am constantly calling our rate people when they send out a pricing showing kbps when it should read KBps, HUGE DIFFERENCE, and they don't even know they've made a mistake because they just do pricing, they don't undestand data.
