Friday, January 15, 2010

The Rising Cost of Water

These have been tough times for a lot of folks lately, but look on the bright side - you didn't get a water bill for $4,500, like a lot of people in Pittsburgh did. Here's how it happened: The Pittsburgh Sewer & Water Authority hired a firm in California to do its billing, and that firm had a European-born technician. In Europe, they write their numbers differently from the way we do it. Something that reads $4,500.00 here in the U.S. would read $4.500,00. Or a water bill for $45.00 would be written as $45,00.

But the computer couldn't read that comma, so all those figures went in as $4500. And Pittsburghers began receiving water bills that were exactly 100 times what they should have been.

The Pittsburgh water people heard about the error immediately, and sent out new water bills to the 13,000 customers who had gotten inflated ones. (They also announced that any poor saps who had actually paid the hundred-times-too-big bill would get a refund.) No word on whether that European technician was fired, or simply taught how to write his numbers properly.

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