Woman Receives $15 Quadrillion Phone Bill

When a French woman received her phone bill, she had to do a bit of head counting, but ultimately she was pretty sure she didn’t run up a $15 quadrillion bill with her carrier.

Want to see that in actual numbers? 15,000,000,000,000,000.

A woman in Pessac in the Bordeaux region of France got the ultimate shocker when she received a phone bill from her carrier that said she owed 11,721,000,000,000,000 euros (which is where we get $15 quadrillion from). Solenne San Jose was floored by the bill, calling her service provider to find out exactly what went wrong with her statement, reports MSN.

“There were so many zeros I couldn’t even work out how much it was,” she said.

Things went from bad to worse when her provider (Bouygues Telecom) told her that there was nothing they could do about the charge since statements are computer-generated, and that they couldn’t stop the balance from being automatically debited to her bank account.

According to the Herald Sun, $15 quadrillion is roughly 6,000 times France’s annual economic output.

After a series of frantic calls, the provider finally brought down the $15 quadrillion bill to the more reasonable 117.21 euros. Bouygues Telecom also clarified that the mix-up had been due to a printing error and a subsequent misunderstanding between the client and staff at their call center.

Solenne San Jose also had the true amount she owed waived for the trouble.

What would you do if you got a phone bill for $15 quadrillion and your service provider said that there was nothing they could do about it?