• synp (unregistered) in reply to vr602
    vr602:
    OK so here's where you can help: Next time you're working on an invoicing/billing/demands system, suggest they build in a) minimum cost threshold (i.e. don't send bill for $0.1), b) "account needs attention" flag, so that you can get a human to look at unpaid accounts worth $0.1, and c) manual adjustments, so they can clear accounts owing said $0.1. There, fixed that for you.

    (a) is relatively easy, but should be in the requirements of the billing system, not an implementation decision

    (b) costs money - it involves a batch job (easy) and a real-life human job to process the output of the batch job. Definitely not something the programmer can decide, or even the guy doing the design. Management should be willing.

    (c) has GUI implications, training implications, so yes, that's also part of the design and a management decision.

  • (cs) in reply to fuffuf
    fuffuf:
    snoofle:
    fanguad:
    Who really cares if you're $1 short on your $10,000 bill?
    Chase Manhattan.

    I know it was only for one cent, but they pissed me off so much that it was the principal of the thing.

    Ya gotta love corporations and the drones that work for their billing departments.

    well, if this is true, I'm not sure if "the corporations" are the only retards in this story. take a chill pill, man.

    you know what they say: "it takes two to tango"

    I guess you missed this sentence in snoofle's story: "Apparently, due to a round off error in their calculations, my balance was $0.01, which after several months of dunning me, they put in for collection." So if he didn't fight the charge, his credit would have been screwed for the next six or seven years.

    I swear this exact same exchange happened earlier in the thread, but I can't find it now.

  • (cs) in reply to Zemm
    Zemm:
    tRENT:
    I also got multiple invoice from the government once for $0, I called and called to try to get this problem fixed, but could never. So I finally wrote a check for $0 dollars and that corrected the problem.

    Sounds like an urban legend ;-)

    http://forum2.breakthechain.org/exclusives/zerobill.html

    (Well if your $0.00 cheque crashed the banking system then it would be TRWTF)

    Not an urban legend, even happens in the UK :)

    I got a FINAL bill from British Gas for £0.00 on a closed account, even better was when I rang up and was told the support-drone couldn't cancel it. To be fair she did try to enter my card details, but the payment software seemed to be slightly better written than the billing system and it wouldn't accept zero as an amount. (I didn't do anything after that and it seems to have resolved itself)

    NTL (internet/phone provider) once gave me about a hundred pounds credit for no good reason. I bumped my internet speed up a tier for one month (it was free to try) and then moved it back down before the next billing checkpoint, this seemed to confuse their system and it then gave me my internet totally free for the month then CREDITED me for my old service level AND the one I tried...

  • lokey (unregistered) in reply to res
    res:
    fanguad:
    Here's a surprising non-WTF. I worked at the bursar's office at my university. Every semester, all outstanding student bills less than a dollar were just set to zero. This policy wasn't published anywhere, presumably to prevent students from cheating the school out of $12 or so.

    Still, that's totally how these things should be run. Who really cares if you're $1 short on your $10,000 bill?

    The taxman cares...

    Must be a really small school - let's see, $1 per student per semester, average student body 21,000 students, times two is - about $42,000 per year in lost revenue - maybe YOU don't care, but where I work, that would put someone out of a job...

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    fanguad:
    Who really cares if you're $1 short on your $10,000 bill?
    Chase Manhattan.

    When I was in school, I had student loans totalling about $10K (thirty years ago). After working for a while, I decided to just pay it off. I called them and asked for the pay-off amount. They sent me a letter saying the amount was $xxx if paid by [date]. [...] We get in front of the judge [...]

    Great story. You are lucky they sent you a letter with the pay off amount & due date. Most places now do everything over the phone, and good luck trying to get the recordings of the phone calls "for training purposes" from the companies.

    I had a run in with the energy company (British Gas) for about 18 months over a spurious meter reading they were trying to charge me for. Got as far as bailiffs turning up on the doorstep. One of the really annoying features of the exchange was that they would send me letters (bills) but if I sent them a letter back in response it disappeared into some black hole. Similarly with email. The only way I could communicate with them was by phone to the call centre, which always entailed a 10 minute wait and then having to explain the whole story to the bod that answered the phone. No way I am ever going to go back to being their customer again in my life.

  • (cs) in reply to lokey
    lokey:
    res:
    fanguad:
    Here's a surprising non-WTF. I worked at the bursar's office at my university. Every semester, all outstanding student bills less than a dollar were just set to zero. This policy wasn't published anywhere, presumably to prevent students from cheating the school out of $12 or so.

    Still, that's totally how these things should be run. Who really cares if you're $1 short on your $10,000 bill?

    The taxman cares...

    Must be a really small school - let's see, $1 per student per semester, average student body 21,000 students, times two is - about $42,000 per year in lost revenue - maybe YOU don't care, but where I work, that would put someone out of a job...

    Do the maths! It's going to cost them 40c for the stamp, what 3c for the envelope, 2c for paper&ink plus the cost of someone running the report, loading the envelope stuffing machine (if they have one) and mailing the letters. Oh and then they have to process the cheques when they come in, maybe they have bank charges on cheques? Small credit card payments will surely have charges. All of that is going to add up to more than $1 cost to the university.

  • (cs) in reply to Leon
    Leon:
    Places it is appropriate to use the phrase "mission-critical":
    1. Front lines of the military
    2. NASA

    I think that poster was either a troll or a jerk. But with so many responders arguing the point, I'd like to offer an alternative explanation:

    Maybe he thinks of the phrase as "mission: critical" rather than "mission-critical". The former means that the mission itself is critical, as in life or death. The latter means that some task is critical to the mission, as in success or failure.

  • (cs) in reply to fanguad
    fanguad:
    Who really cares if you're $1 short on your $10,000 bill?
    I'll tell you who: Clifford Stoll, that's who. He cares. He really really cares.
  • (cs) in reply to SuperousOxide
    SuperousOxide:
    David Walker:
    Oh yes, one other stupidity: Many years ago, the IRS (in the U.S.) mailed my ex-father-in-law a bunch of papers with calculations showing that if he had not rounded his income and deductions to the nearest dollar on his income tax forms, which is allowed (and most professional accountants do this routinely), he would have owed 17 cents less on his taxes.

    They included a check for 17 cents. He was furious at this waste of postage, paper, and effort.

    The real question is, if they want you to round all your amounts to the nearest dollar, why do you leave the cents spaces blank on all the forms? If you want people to round values and enter zero in those spaces, why don't you print zero in those spaces FOR them?

    It's up to you. You can round to the nearest dollar if you want to, or you can enter everything including the cents.

    Any difference in the resulting amount of tax SHOULD be ignored by the IRS, and I think they are better at this now (along with not charging or refunding any amounts less than a dollar, as was pointed out earlier).

  • Ken (unregistered) in reply to h

    Huh. Many years ago, I was visiting the US when my wife required emergency treatment. Although she did not use the services of an anesthetist, she was billed for his services.

    I wrote the hospital concerned numerous times over a period of some 18 months from my home in SA. Nobody ever responded.

    Finally, I wrote this:

    "Enclosed is payment for services rendered." and sent the mail. I received a reply a couple of weeks later, saying "You forgot to enclose the check."

    I wrote back: "I said 'I enclose payment for services rendered.' The payment was nothing because there were no services."

    I never heard from them again.

    So it is possible to make a payment of nothing.

    If I'd thought about it at the time, a check for zero bucks would have been a real hoot! <g> I bet they would have processed it!

  • Tim (unregistered) in reply to Shill

    Because then people would just write in the .00 assuming that since there is no dedicated space for cents, they have to write it in.

  • (cs) in reply to Bob N Freely
    Bob N Freely:
    After arguing with him for a while about why I would be paying for my parents' phone bill, and why I would fake different handwriting to do it, he finally agreed to contact my parents and confirm that it was okay to remove the payment from their account and apply it to mine. I don't think he ever called them, probably because he was too afraid of admitting a mistake, but he did credit my account.

    ... which is of course much easier than, you know, just paying again and asking your parents to give you the money back.

    I agree, company bureaucracy makes for some really impressing WTFs, but this one seems self-made to me. The employee who wrote the number probably did its best to "save the ticket", so the company wouldn't need to transfer the money back to you and cause even more paperwork for everyone.

  • (cs) in reply to lokey
    lokey:
    res:
    fanguad:
    Here's a surprising non-WTF. I worked at the bursar's office at my university. Every semester, all outstanding student bills less than a dollar were just set to zero. This policy wasn't published anywhere, presumably to prevent students from cheating the school out of $12 or so.

    Still, that's totally how these things should be run. Who really cares if you're $1 short on your $10,000 bill?

    The taxman cares...

    Must be a really small school - let's see, $1 per student per semester, average student body 21,000 students, times two is - about $42,000 per year in lost revenue - maybe YOU don't care, but where I work, that would put someone out of a job...

    Where's that, the Philippines?

    In most of the developed world, it costs at least $5 in processing expense to deal with any random invoice (I've heard quotes of $50, but I believe that only applies at the corporate level, and generally includes line items and stock-control).

    Losing the single person at $42,000 a year who deals with $1 invoices -- in your notional world, where every single student in a State University mysteriously acquires an outstanding bill of the order of $1 -- is therefore probably a cost saving of $150,000.

    But your job is probably safe, because it's difficult enough to get a proposition like this past management, let alone past somebody smart enough to take their shoes and socks off and submit a posting to TDWTF.

  • cbv (unregistered) in reply to snoofle

    "Ya gotta love corporations and the drones that work for their billing departments."

    The first few years I was out of college, I wasn't landing the greatest jobs. In fact, it was a common occurrence to be without electricity for 3 or 4 days every month while I waited for the paycheck that would allow me to pay my bill. Needless to say, my student loan payments got put on the back burner WAY more often than they should.

    So, one day I get a phone call from a real hardass collection agent, informing me that the entire $30,000 plus balance of my loan was due immediately, and would I like to do a "check by phone".

    Trying to hold back my laughter at his belief that some young punk like me who had trouble paying a $60 electric bill could just go ahead and write a check for 30 grand on the spot, I informed him that it wouldn't be possible, I simply didn't have the money.

    Having been trained to never give up, he offered to let me post date the check (as if that was going to do any good). I said "Sure, but I'll need to date it for about 10 years from now".

    The WTF? He agreed to it.

    I didn't go through with it, and did eventually get my student loans handled in a reasonable way, but it just goes to show you the stupidity that collection agents will display to get one more "paid" item on their daily stats.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to stationary
    stationary:
    Franz Kafka:
    Random832:
    When you're coding such a system how do you justify putting in an exception for the guy who's only off by 17 cents?

    if (discrepancyAmount < Currency(5.00)) fuggedaboutit();

    You might want to make that abs(discepancyAmount) - if you casually toss out the fact that you owe a customer $10,000 things could get ugly.

    This is the subsystem that sends out nag letters and escalates to collections. AP handles the part where the customer is owed money.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Zemm

    [quote user="Zemm"][quote user="tRENT"]So I finally wrote a check for $0 dollars and that corrected the problem.[/quote]

    Sounds like an urban legend ;-)

    http://forum2.breakthechain.org/exclusives/zerobill.html

    (Well if your $0.00 cheque crashed the banking system then it would be TRWTF) [/quote]

    Funny, the version I heard ended with the company writing a note back to the customer asking him not to do that again.

    [quote user="real_aardvark"] Must be a really small school - let's see, $1 per student per semester, average student body 21,000 students, times two is - about $42,000 per year in lost revenue - maybe YOU don't care, but where I work, that would put someone out of a job...[/quote]Where's that, the Philippines?

    [...]

    Losing the single person at $42,000 a year who deals with $1 invoices -- in your notional world, where every single student in a State University mysteriously acquires an outstanding bill of the order of $1 -- is therefore probably a cost saving of $150,000. [/quote]

    It's worse than that (he's dead, Jim): each student will on average attend 4 or 8 semesters, depending, so the simple expedient of tacking the errant $1 on to the next bill reduces the average loss to $10k/year.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to fanguad

    My university's library (for which I work) zeroes any outstanding fines under $20.00, and it's a published policy - and boy do the students take advantage of it.

  • Trish (unregistered) in reply to fanguad
    fanguad:
    Here's a surprising non-WTF. I worked at the bursar's office at my university. Every semester, all outstanding student bills less than a dollar were just set to zero. This policy wasn't published anywhere, presumably to prevent students from cheating the school out of $12 or so.

    Still, that's totally how these things should be run. Who really cares if you're $1 short on your $10,000 bill?

    Actually, I am afraid in Germany at least, they could run into trouble for that. I know some people in different accounting-departments, and no matter how large the company, every single cent of discrepancy HAS to be found... wich easily leads to 3 or more hours spent on finding that single cent. I wouldn't care about that cent... accounting surely does ;).

  • (cs) in reply to Trish
    Trish:
    fanguad:
    Here's a surprising non-WTF. I worked at the bursar's office at my university. Every semester, all outstanding student bills less than a dollar were just set to zero. This policy wasn't published anywhere, presumably to prevent students from cheating the school out of $12 or so.

    Still, that's totally how these things should be run. Who really cares if you're $1 short on your $10,000 bill?

    Actually, I am afraid in Germany at least, they could run into trouble for that. I know some people in different accounting-departments, and no matter how large the company, every single cent of discrepancy HAS to be found... wich easily leads to 3 or more hours spent on finding that single cent. I wouldn't care about that cent... accounting surely does ;).

    If it's an actual policy, then it's budgeted somewhere - there's probably a line item on their budget that says "$35 - waived insignificant balances". No accounting problem.

  • wgc (unregistered)

    Hey, I just did that too ...

    When one of our EZ-Pass transponders didn't work correctly, we got a violation notice for the $0.30 toll (rather than debitting it from the account as they should have). After they sent the "Final Notice", I recently mailed them back a check for $0.30. So ... three pieces of correspondence and their postage ...

  • Phrediac (unregistered)

    At varsity in the early eighties I received an account for .55 - and a handwritten note saying: "Please don't pay this, we're dying to see what the computer does."

  • (cs)

    Something happened on Sunday that reminded me of these stories. My boyfriend paid for something online for 1 czech crown (about .06 USD, .04 EUR). A short time later - SUNDAY evening, about 7pm - the bank called. They wanted to verify the charge to his credit card for 1CZK. 6 cents US, 4 cents Euro.

  • Bob N Freely (unregistered) in reply to PSWorx
    PSWorx:
    Bob N Freely:
    After arguing with him for a while about why I would be paying for my parents' phone bill, and why I would fake different handwriting to do it, he finally agreed to contact my parents and confirm that it was okay to remove the payment from their account and apply it to mine. I don't think he ever called them, probably because he was too afraid of admitting a mistake, but he did credit my account.

    ... which is of course much easier than, you know, just paying again and asking your parents to give you the money back.

    I agree, company bureaucracy makes for some really impressing WTFs, but this one seems self-made to me. The employee who wrote the number probably did its best to "save the ticket", so the company wouldn't need to transfer the money back to you and cause even more paperwork for everyone.

    I'm sorry, but when a company screws up, I expect them to do what is necessary to fix their mistake. In this case, they screwed up twice. They lost the payment stub, which is excusable. But then they altered the check, which is actually bank fraud, in order to credit it to an account. It didn't occur to them that the amount on the check did not coincide with the balance of the account they were crediting, nor that the name on the account was different.

    They could have simply not cashed the check, in which case, the problem would have been self-correcting when I called to ask about my missed payment. Consider if I had moved to a new address and hadn't yet gotten new checks from my bank. If the people whose account was credited were not my parents, would you still expect me to pay up and ask them for a refund so that the phone company didn't have to bother?

  • Glenn (unregistered)

    Lol .. It took 10 days to deliver that 'mail' ;-)

  • Kevin (unregistered) in reply to Ken
    Ken:
    If I'd thought about it at the time, a check for zero bucks would have been a real hoot! <g> I bet they would have processed it!

    Somewhere on the Computer Stupidities website there's a story about a guy who kept getting a bill from his credit card company for $0. After several calls failed to solve the problem he sent them a check for $0. The bills stopped, but a few weeks later he got an angry call from his bank. His $0 check had crashed their computer system.

  • Dennis Henry (unregistered)

    Why is my phone service shut off? I paid my bill last week when it wasn't due until this week. I need someone immediatley to come out and check it out and get me hooked back up if is because of the weather. Also, I should not be charged for the time I am shut off until you get me hooked back up and for the service coming out when it isn't my fault. So, make sure them adjustments are made on next month's bill so I am not being charged for this time. Thanks! Dennis

  • alexthelion (unregistered) in reply to fanguad

    people in USA does not know how to work..... they never go to college....when company like windstream outsource they say WTF...... why dont you ppl learn to work... so that ppl in india will not loose there job.... because windstream is taking back there bussiness back to US..

  • Allan (unregistered) in reply to Ken
    Ken:
    If I'd thought about it at the time, a check for zero bucks would have been a real hoot! <g> I bet they would have processed it!

    I used to work for a bank, and I can tell you for a fact: there are a LOT of checks written for $0.00. As far as I can tell, most of them come from insurance companies. Not sure why.

    That isn't even the wierdest part.

    If an insurance company mailed you a check for $0.00, would you "cash" it? Of course not. If you found it humorous, you'd hang it on the wall and show it to everyone. If you didn't, you'd just throw it away. It doesn't make sense to cash it, right?

    But the insurance company had a policy. If they EVER wrote a check, and it didn't clear within (I think) 4 months, they would automatically try to clear it from their books. To do this, they would routinely place a stop-payment order.

    Because they were a high-volume business account, they got a special rate: it only cost them $1 to place a stop-payment order. But the VAST number of these stop-payment orders were for checks under $0.10, including quite a few for $0.00.

    My bosses at the bank never seemed to think there was anything strange about this. I thought it was stupid. That was 20 years ago; I don't know for a fact if this is still going on (Security Pacific Bank no longer exists under that name), but I'd bet money that it is.

  • (cs) in reply to David Walker
    David Walker:
    Oh yes, one other stupidity: Many years ago, the IRS (in the U.S.) mailed my ex-father-in-law a bunch of papers with calculations showing that if he had not rounded his income and deductions to the nearest dollar on his income tax forms, which is allowed (and most professional accountants do this routinely), he would have owed 17 cents less on his taxes.

    They included a check for 17 cents. He was furious at this waste of postage, paper, and effort.

    The IRS did something like this to me too. My first year of being a productive member of society, back in highschool, I made such a small amount of money at my part time garage job that my taxes totaled $6.86. I dutifully did my taxes, submitted them, and got a check back for $6.86 a few months later. I lost it, and six months later they sent me another, coincidentally a few days after I found the old one. I decided to see how far they'd go, and didn't deposit it for a year or two... I think I have four or five of them sitting around. Then I apparently calculated wrongly, or rounded up what I paid them because I thought I was going to end up with a late penalty and wanted to just get it over with, and they took the $6.86, my overpayment for the late penalty+taxes, and deduced that I was owed $1.78. So I have a few checks for $1.78 now also.

  • (cs) in reply to Ken

    Don't ever try that cheque with 0 bucks on it. I did it once to get rid of an annoying bill for services unrendered, and whereas it solved my problem of the bill for services unrendered, THE BANK charged me the equivalent of US$30 for processing the cheque since it had a value they defined as "unrecognisable" or something...

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    oh, i just remembered a story where someone drove a billing department crazy by deliberately OVERPAYING by one cent, and not cashing the one-cent checks they kept sending him!

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