A woman in France received a phone bill for the total amount of 12 quadrillion euros. According to Gawker, that’s about 15.5 quadrillion U.S. dollars.
Written out in full, that’s €12,000,000,000,000,000, or $15,500,000,000,000,000.
That’s just over 1,000 times the World Bank’s current estimate of the GDP of the United States, $15.09 trillion. Gawker claims it is 6,000 times greater than France’s annual economic output.
It’s about 221 times greater than the Gross Domestic Product of the entire world, which the World Bank estimates is $69.97 trillion.
The person currently ranked as the world’s richest person in Forbes, Carlos Slim Helu, is worth about 1/1000th of the global total. This woman in France would need the combined wealth of 221,000 Carlos Slim Helus just to pay this bill.
I bet the bill is an error.
Even so, the mouth breathers at the phone company, Bouygues Telecom, apparently lacked the autonomy or manual dexterity to actually do anything about the bill, except offer a payment plan.
According to Solenne San Jose, a Bouygues Telecom rep started out by telling her the total could not be revised and threatened to draw the money directly from her bank account. After “a series of frantic phone calls,” the company agreed to let San Jose set up an installment plan.
Not surprisingly, she turned down the generous solution, opting instead to pay the 117 euros she owed and not a million more.
San Jose ultimately parted ways with the company, and, after some prodding from the media, Bouygues Telecom agreed to cover her final bill.
Seriously, I would have loved to see the company attempt to draw the money from her bank. That either would have caused laughter from a bank employee, or it would have crashed the entire EU economy once and for all. (The former option seems both more likely and more favorable.)
Since the company agreed to cover the bill, does that mean they must come up with 12 quadrillion euros to balance their accounts? Have they called Goldman Sachs? It seems more likely that they finally noticed a disparity between the claimed total amount of 117 euros and a number that makes my hand hurt when I try to write it. Seriously, how does this even happen? Most calculators don’t even have enough spaces to count to 12 quadrillion.
Photo credit: “Bird on a Wire” by JosephHart on stock.xchng.
