French woman gets $15 quadrillion phone bill

[KingBlack]

And you thought your monthly cell phone bill was expensive.

Solenne San Jose, a resident of Pessac, France, recently received a phone bill for €11,721,000,000,000,000 (approximately $14.8 quadrillion CAD). Supposedly, that was the amount she was being charged to close her account with Bouygues Telecom.

"There were so many zeros I couldn't even work out how much it was," said San Jose in a Herald Sun
A former teaching assistant, San Jose sought to close her account with the phone company after losing her job a month earlier.

When San Jose called the company to resolve the problem, she became increasingly concerned when she was told that they couldn't amend the computer-generated statement and that the amount was going to be withdrawn from her bank account.

ABC News reports that the company offered to cut her some slack: they would set up a payment plan, so she could pay off the outrageous sum in installments.

San Jose continued to call the company repeatedly, until Bouygues Telecom conceded that the bill should have only been for €117.21. The mix-up was blamed on a printing error and misunderstanding with the company's call centre. Because of the company's error (and likely because of the worldwide attention it has received), Bouygues Telecom has waived the actual amount San Jose was expected to pay.

According to a translated story from Sud Ouest, the phone bill amounted to 5,872 times the GDP of France.