World Science Festival Discusses VerizonMath - Continued

The WSF Website has recently been updated with their discussion on The Illusion of Certainty: Risk, Probability and Chance, which includes a few clips from my now infamous Verizon call.

It was very interesting to see and hear the panellists' and audience's reaction to the clips. I imagine this was the largest gathering yet of folks that could truly appreciate it, all in one place.

Thank you Leonard Mlodinow for choosing to include this in your discussion. By the way, as I watched this I made kind of the same anxious expression you did while waiting for the audience to hear the "punch line". :)

Speaking of probability, I never could have imagined back in 2006 when I originally recorded this CS fiasco that it would wind up being used in such an interesting context, incredible.

Here it is for your nerdy enjoyment:



If you don't want to listen to the whole talk (though it's much less painful than my full recording), the panellists start to discuss it at about 29:00.

World Science Festival discusses VerizonMath

Tonight during a session called "The Illusion of Certainty" clips from my call with the call center reps at Verizon will be referenced. It should be interesting how they work it into the talk.

To watch live visit The World Science Festival website or watch below.

Edit: Broadcast has been delayed. I will update when a new date/link is available.

Watch live streaming video from worldsciencefestival at livestream.com

Verizon to issue Tens of Millions in refunds for erroneous data charges.

As reported on CNN.com Verizon will be issuing tens of millions of dollars in refunds to customers that were erroneously charged for data usage that they did not initiate.

This has nothing to do with the VerizonMath data rate quoting issue that I was involved with, but is very interesting nonetheless.

I've often wondered about the implications of software glitches, and this one is a doozy. It's probably been hurting Verizon's bottom line for some time even just in customer complaints, customer service calls and customer dissatisfaction (assuming individuals were not able to get the charges reversed). It is tangentially related to my situation in that the CS feedback should really be a priority that is investigated and reacted to early, such that these types of problems are handled when the costs are low (nip in the bud) rather than the typical brush it under the rug and hope it will go away mentality. I can't help but think that if this problem had been caught when the refunds would have amounted to a few million that Verizon's net costs would have been significantly less. Administering millions of refunds has to be a costly process. I wonder if they will issue the refunds including interest.

PS: thanks to Chris for bringing this to my attention.

The Gregory Brothers

If you haven't yet heard/seen the magic of The Gregory Brothers, you should really check out their youtube channel and their more serious music "Meet the Gregory Brothers" available from online music retailers (google it for a free preview at amazon etc.).

Their auto-tune the news creations are absolutely brilliant, very catchy and hysterically funny. I have reserved a location on my featured "ads" area in the upper right to hopefully drive some traffic and enlighten people to their amazing creations.

New York Times Blog Covers VerizonMath

My brother sent me a link today to an article on The New York Times Blog that references my experiences with Verizon. It's an interesting article, if you are a math nerd like some of us clearly are :).

In other news, there is hope for nerds to find love, I got hitched last weekend! Good luck fellow nerds, there are women out there who appreciate us :).

Mythbuster Adam Savage Has an $11,000 AT&TMath Moment

I'm a little late to the party on this one, but a few readers have brought this to my attention recently (thank you!).

It appears Mythbuster Adam Savage has run into the same sort of issue I had with Verizon, with his provider (and now mine) AT&T.

According to Adam's tweets, due to him very quickly getting a following on twitter (50,000 or so), he seems to have already resolved his issue. It sounded like the service he received from the AT&T reps was significantly better than in my case, consistent with my experiences with AT&T CS in general. FYI, no one pays me to say that, I just like to give credit where credit is due.

I wonder if he was quoted over the phone like I was. Actually I hope he was, otherwise he should have been able to do the math. That said, these companies really need to start quoting in $/MB as I had suggested in the aftermath of my debacle. They might also want to start negotiating and charging more reasonable roaming rates. It's hard to believe that while AT&T charges $60/month for "unlimited" data, (which translates to 5gb magically) in the US, it has to charge $75,000 (1,250 times as much!) for the same amount of data if you cross the border into Canada.

Surprisingly, on Verizon, that same 5gb of Canadian roaming data (in my case) would only have cost $10,000 - quite a bargain by comparison ;). Also interestingly, had I had my problem back in the day with AT&T instead of Verizon, my $71.79 vs 71.79c would have been $538 vs. $5.38 - yeesh. Remember, that was about 35 megs, or equivalent to 10ish mobile mp3/iTunes downloads.

Now of course not everyone with that plan uses the whole 5gb, a fact that I'm sure the actuaries at AT&T and Verizon have worked out. So if for example we us a more conservative assumption, like perhaps the average monthly usage is 400mb/month, that would still cost $6000 with AT&T and $800 with Verizon, as roaming data vs. domestic. Something still seems out of whack.

Follow Adam here: https://twitter.com/donttrythis, and check out the comments here: https://twitter.com/#search?q=donttrythis.

Also, this event has prompted me to setup a verizonmath twitter account. At this point I don't know how much twitting is in order, but maybe you'll see something new up there now and then.

As a side note, Adam, if you are reading this, I'd jump the first plane to SF if I ever had the opportunity to have a beer with you and/or the rest of the amazing MB crew and/or a couple of birds! One can dream :).

Failblog Verizonmath Youtube Video hits #45 of all time in Comedy

It looks like via failblog.com my call (in condensed form) has reached over 1.8 million people, and ranks in the top 50 of all time in terms of user ratings. Not too shabby. :)