Aaron is getting his Comcast shut off if he doesn’t cough up -$0.05.
So, we suppose that would mean he has to go down there and take $0.05 from someone at Comcast?
Or should he send a check for -$0.05?
Can we call Jack Donaghy about this yet?
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I wonder what would happen if he sent them a cheque for $ -0.05. If we’re lucky, it will warp the fabric of space-time, causing the Comcast office to collapse upon itself “House of Usher”-style.
I’m going to send Comcast a check for -$1,000,000,000 and retire to my island lair.
It’s a bummer that there is only a “Flag for review” link next to your comment. I want a “Flag for awesome.”
We can only dream about such a thing of awesome.
Who would’ve thunk that Comcast was the glue holding the Universe together.
Oh well, we had a good run.
I think by sending that check, someone will say “Kebert Xela” and will send Alex Trebek to another dimension.
Actually i recall a similar story where they kept threatening to cut off his cable if he didn’t pay $0.00.
so he wrote them a cheque for $0.00. The bank flagged his account and shut it off and it took a week to get it going again. It’s hard to win when fighting the machine.
so they are sending him 5 cents then?
…and if they don’t send it then they will interrupt his service.
Huh. The minus before the 5 cents confuses me a bit. I guess I would call first. If that does not work, I would send them five pennies. Take that!
it means they owe him 5 cents, but whoever coded their system was such a huge moron that they set it to auto generate a bill regardless of if comcast owes them or they owe comcast which is the only time generating a bill should matter.
given comcast managed to double bill me last month then had issues crediting my account with what they took last month, its not surprising.
Yup. The difference between (if x != 0) and (if x
I swear I had a complete reply – no idea what happened to it.
You used a less-than sign, aka left angle bracket, interpreted by the site as the beginning of some html. To use special characters like that, you need to use an HTML entity – < – which will show up as <
This is what happens when companies get too big. It should be a simple fix with one quick phone call, but I’m certain that everyone available in the Comcast phone tree is genuinely unable to fix this problem with their system without finding the one, unknown person who has access to press the right button.
Yes, and did you ever notice the little “minus” sign is so miniscule you almost need a magnifying glass to see it? My elderly Mother-in-Law double paid one month, and kept paying…until she had a credit of over $90.00 and called me screaming about high cable rates. I called Comcast and asked them why they would even print a bill like that. I ended up intercepting the bills until the credit was exhausted because they couldn’t stop sending the bill. They are asshats.
Send disconnection note if (balance > 0) not if (balance != 0)
Yep. Someone’s billing system has an issue. And who woulda guessed it’s Comcrap.
Now there’s someone who knows both their code AND their HTML
Whatever you do, don’t send them 5 cents. Then they’ll start billing you for -$0.10.
Go to their office and demand your nickelback. So to speak.
I guess he should send Comcast a similar letter. To avoid an interruption of my service, please pay $0.05.
Would not work. Comcast wears the pants in this relationship. Any effort to depants them would result in them discontinuing the relationship.
I do believe that Comcast just depantsed themselves.
Ever since word started to get out about this Comcast-NBC deal, I’ve been wondering about Jack’s future. He might have to give up his microwave oven duties (I don’t know if he ever had remote control duties … right now he’s Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming).
Then again, GE isn’t divesting itself of NBC, so I guess he could keep his microwave oven responsibilities.
Any insight?
Didn’t Comcast buy NBC?
No, they’re buying 51% of it; GE will keep the other 49%.
They’ll buy the other 49% over the next 8 years, in stages.
Surely, this will cost much more than 5 actual cents to fix…
It already cost them more than $0.05 to send him a bill demanding they pay him money or they’ll cut him off…
More info from where this was first posted (what, you don’t want to scare people by linking to Joe.My.God ?) – Aaron now lives in Portland, OR, this “bill” is regarding service he discontinued when he moved away from Jersey City several months ago. So not only are they threatening to disconnnect his service, they’re threatening to disconnect service that’s already been disconnected.
If they find what they perceive to be a delinquency on the customer’s part, they’ll shut off your new services too if they know its still you, just somewhere else.
Can he send them a check like this:
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_TXdnLKoYLHQ/SyFDEbUinrI/AAAAAAAABho/YEqai7gpo-U/s800/failblog.nsfw.7.jpg
But you know…with the equation equaling -.05 and the check written out to Comcast
Randall Munroe rocks my face off, but I still wonder if that check was considered valid.
Too bad that image misrepresents the value of the check. The captioner misread e^(iπ) as e^(2π), and ended up with 535 instead of −1.
The actual value of the check is two tenths of one cent. $(0.002 + −1 + 1) = $0.002.
The canundrum here is that if he sends them a check for $0.05, he’ll get a letter saying he now owes them -$0.10.
everyone is missing the point. they want him to think he owes a nickel. if he sends them a nickel we will all be next. and those nickels will add up.
I’m guessing next month’s bill will ask for -$.10. And then we can have a tag ‘nickeled & dimed’.
How often is he charged for his service? Assuming his monthly is more than $.05, won’t this resolve itself in less than 30 days?
Not unless Comcast decides to follow through with their insanity and disconnect him, in which case he will continue to receive collection notices until he resolves it with customer service.
That just brings a whole lot of other questions. What would a credit reporting agency (Equifax, TU, Experian) do with a collection trade line for negative money? Would they kick that back saying “sorry we dont place collection lines for negative money.”
And what about the collection agency themselves? What happens if they submit it to a collection agency. Does that merit a call from the collection agency to the original creditor saying “are you out of your flippin’ minds?”
No, you would just get an extra point on your credit score! And with negative interest, who knows how much money you could make! Negative debt may just be the answer to all of the world’s problems.
So yeah. Comcast might wanna get on this.
See my comment above. He moved, this service is no more. It’s an ex-service. It’s joined the choir invisible. etc etc.
Sprint PCS once turned off my service because I overpaid my bill and they owed me $4.00. No one I talked to could remedy the situation, I imagine Aaron is going to experience the same level of frustration that I did…
Would a drawing of a spider suffice?
LOL!!! Maybe a drawing of a peacock would suffice…
i think i would be trying to figure out how to send a drawing of a ” – spider”
The funny thing is that the collection dept would probably fix it if they got anything, so yes, -spiders would work.
A while spider on a black background? An upside-down spider? A spider made of antimatter? Hmmmm.
My homeowner’s association does this ALL THE TIME. “Please be advised that you owe -$1.28. If this situation is not resolved we will send in the Luftwaffe” etc etc.
I’m starting to think not even all the computer programmers in India and China will be enough to fix all the cheesed up billing systems in the world. I guess that means better job security for the competent ones.
Surprised comcastcares hasn’t chimed in yet…
It would so be worth my time to go down to a Comcast office and demand a nickel from the poor schmuck working there. Of course, I’m easily amused.
That would be fun. But I, too, am easily amused.
The topic of negative money alone amuses me.
I returned a $79.99 product to Office Max the other day and they gave me $80.00–I’d be happy to donate the proceeds.