I’m pretty sure I did the math right below. But I was also pretty sure yesterday that “jibberish” was a word, but it’s not — it’s “gibberish.” I’m tempted to keep the typo in yesterday’s title because it turned “gibberish” into gibberish, though. — Dan

The Phone Calls That Cost €220 Million a Minute (for Life)

The term “gross domestic product” is an economic measure. It estimates the total value of goods and services that a country (or other region) produces in a given time period. For the year 2023, the worldwide gross domestic product — that is, the cumulative output of everything created on Earth (and I guess, the International Space Station) was roughly $100 trillion. It’s a really big number, bigger than any of us can reasonably fathom.

And yet, there are bigger numbers. For example, $11 quadrillion is a lot more than $100 trillion — it’s 110 times as much. That number is so high that, assuming GDP stayed flat year over year, it would account for the entire output of humanity for an entire century. It is, literally, more money than many of us will see the world create over the course of our lifetime.

Which is probably why it’s a bit too much to pay for phone service.

Unfortunately for a French woman named Solenne San Jose, her phone company didn’t agree- at least, not right away. In 2012, San Jose was living in Pessac, a commune of about 65,000 people not too far from Bordeaux. (Here’s a map.) But she had fallen on hard times — she had recently lost her job and was looking to make ends meet. She called the phone company, Bouygues Telecom, and asked them to close her account. No problem, they told her —they’d just need to send her a bill for the amount still owed on the account.

When the bill arrived, San Jose told the press, she “almost had a heart attack. There were so many zeroes I couldn't even work out how much it was.” There were a dozen of them, behind an 11 and a 721. In total, Bouygues Telecom billed her for €11,721,000,000,000,000 (or €11.721 quadrillion) to be exact —and apologies for not accounting for the currency exchange, but it really doesn’t matter when you’re dealing with a number that high. It’s simply unpayable: again, it’d take the entire world a century to generate that much economic output.

So San Jose called Bouygues Telecom to tell them there was, obviously, a mistake. And Bouygues Telecom told her, no, the fee was as demanded. As she told Sud-Ouest (via Commsrisk), “The first time I called, I spent at least 45 minutes with one operator. He replied: ‘It’s automatic, I can do nothing.’ Another told me that I would be contacted to arrange payment in several installments.”

The customer service agent didn’t specify exactly how many installments the company would afford San Jose, but let’s do some math because, in this case, the math is actually fun. Let’s say she was 20 years old at the time — her age has gone unreported — and she’d live to be 120. As any fan of Rent knows, there are 525,600 minutes in a non-leap year, which gives us 52,560,000 minutes over San Jose’s hypothetical century left on Earth, again, excluding February 29s. If Bouygues Telecom created an installment plan such that one installment was due every single minute for the rest of her life (except for that brief, glorious reprieve every four years), each installment would come out to about €223 million.

(I really hope I got that math right, but even if I messed up, suffice it to say that no one could pay such a bill.)

San Jose called back in hopes of getting a more reasonable customer service agent, but again, as Time reported, was only offered a payment plan. So she turned to the press instead. After news of the impossibly high bill spread, Bouygues Telecom reviewed its procedures in the matter. Unsurprisingly, the error was the phone company’s: the bill was supposed to be €117.21, but the decimal place slipped a bit to the right. San Jose didn’t have to pay the phone company a quadrillion Euros, let alone nearly 12 of them. She only owed the equivalent of about $150.

San Jose didn’t have to pay that amount, either. As the Guardian reported, Bouygues Telecom, thoroughly embarrassed, waived her bill entirely — and agreed to review its customer service procedures.

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More About Phone Charges

Today’s Bonus fact: The 1994 movie “The Santa Clause” is a lighthearted comedy, as suggested by its PG rating. But it had an R-rated joke in it’s original release — accidentally. At one point in the movie, someone hands Tim Allen’s character a piece of paper with someone’s mother’s phone number on it, but the actual number reads “1-800-SPANK-ME.” (It’s not a very good joke.) The producers of the movie didn’t check to see if the number was real, but a bunch of kids did. As the Seattle Times reported, they discovered the hard — and expensive — way that the 800 number redirected to “lines with adult content and high charges [ranging] from $2.50 to $4.99 per minute.” Multiple parents reported receiving hundreds of dollars in charges from their curious kids trying Santa’s friend’s mom’s phone number.

From the Archives: iRich: An iPhone app that definitely wasn’t worth the price tag, and not just because it did nothing.

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And thanks! — Dan