Computer Still Says …

It used to be a standing joke with computer systems when questioning their frequently suspicious outputs. You might call a computer support line to complain about a strange telephone bill, only to be told that the bill is correct because “Computer says …”. even if the bill was unusually large. Of course, the effects of software errors are limited only by the imagination and “unusually” large can really mean just that, such as happened with the unfortunate French woman in 2012 who received a telephone bill for EUR 11.8 quadrillion.1 If you are unaccustomed to numbers like this in your telephone bill, it is hardly surprising as it is around US$13,000,000,000,000,000 or just under 5,000 times the gross domestic product of France for that year; some phone bill. To be fair to the lady’s phone company Bouygues Telecom, they did offer to allow her to pay off the bill in installments, a most generous offer, although they didn’t say how many installments might be necessary. (We know you are desperate to know so at US$1,000 a month, it would take about 50 times the current lifetime of the universe taking bureaucratic innumeracy to new and giddy depths. No mention was made of accumulating interest payments).