I"ve heard of some pretty outrageous phone bills in my time, but nothing so ridiculous as the €11,721,000,000,000,000 a French woman had to pay to close her phone account. Solenne San Jose, from Pessac in the Bordeaux region of southwestern France, was understandably shocked to hear she had to pay so much money - 11.7 quadrillion euros - saying "there were so many zeroes I couldn"t even work out how much it was."
It"s like paying this, except with all the money in the world
Operators at Bouygues Telecom told the woman that they initially couldn"t amend the insane fee, however after some phone calls it was revealed she was supposed to only pay €117.21. Obviously 12 zeros had slipped in there somewhere (was it the office cat?), with the telecom company blaming it on a "printing error" and then a client-staff call center misunderstanding.
It"s lucky that she didn"t have to pay 11.7 quadrillion euros, because that turns out to be more money than the GDP of the entire world (around 54.3 trillion euros). What a relief!
Source: The Age | Case of euros image via Shutterstock