Surprise! DirecTV sends customer $184,000 bill

Maybe if you send thousands of customers a $184,000 bill one of them will just pay it?

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I suspect there’s some selection bias at work.

In the last 5 years, I’ve had to contact vendors 3 times for incorrect. Two of them where for under-billing.

If all 3, guess which one I mentioned to my wife. Hint, it’s not the under-billings. Those are simply boring (if irritating).

And of course, as Rick Mycroft alluded to, the things that get publicity are ridiculously large mistakes (which co-incidentally have no possibility of being paid), and those will tend to be errors in the company’s favour because the worst that can happen in the customer’s direction is that they simply don’t bill you, which is hardly notable (and often a massive pain to straighten out - ugh). The error in the other direction, can, on occasion, reach the quintillions…

But the main point is to never attribute to malice what can be adequately attributed to stupidity. One, you’ll be accurate 9 times out of 10, you’ll be a much happier person, and even better, you’ll make everyone happier around you.

And yes, I do have my own personal perspective on this. In my own professional experience, I’ve on occasion worked in payment processing. Lose a payment owed to the company - the company is angry. Double bill a customer- the company is furious.

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