just got a debt collection call. no big, those people gotta work too and i did owe the bill. the geltleman from payACEI tels me theres a 0.35% annual interest, then tells me that adds up to an extra ten bucks… stop right there… the debts only 300 bucks, the interest is about 1/3 of a cent on the hundred and its only been in collectios a couple months right?! well you take the debt and multiply it by 0.35. he couldnt grasp that that would make it 35% even after explaining the definition of percent, going throught a 5th grade math lesson and verbally working the math out both ways he still insisted it was 0.35%, got frustrated, asked for a supervisor. tried to explain the problem to the supervisor, thought he understood, said he would check the tapes, talk to the collectoer and all the usual mgmt bullshit, i was placated for a moment till he said they would still have to charge me the 3.5% interest. ARRRRRRGH! is basic math that fucking hard?!
Yes.
On their scripts, it probably says something like “multiply balance by 0.35”, which people take to mean 0.35%.
The same way that people see $0.002 as “point-zero-zero-two cents” and not “point-zero-zero-two dollars”.
Decimals are difficult for some people. People who are bad at math.
Is there any way this is legally binding? I mean if they say it’s only .35% shouldn’t you only have to pay ~1/3 of a percent?
I get the impression he could just send them ~1/3 of 1%, and forget the whole thing. They’ll never know they’ve been stiffed. 
Heh. The laundrymat used to have a sign up that said
.25 cents = 6 minutes of drying time
Good deal, I thought! Then I guess maybe someone said something and they were unable to come up with the right words and symbols, because the sign now has
a picture of a quarter = 6 minutes of drying time
With my tendency towards literalism, I misread this to mean somebody wrote “a picture of a quarter” on the sign. 
Hopefully that’s not the case.
To the OP, it could be worse. Most of those of us who don’t speak math know we don’t. I’m remembering a dinner my family had when I was 12. Our bill came to around $50 (a huge amount for our family at that time), and my dad asked my grandma how much to leave as a tip. I said, “well, a good amount for a tip is 15%,” and dad said, “I’m not leaving a waitress $15!” I tried to explain that 15% of $50 dollars is…
And then he knocked me down.
I learned not to argue math.
I used to do billing for a place that charged a certain number of cents per unit. The salespeople wrote their contracts up using, ".02/unit". Our billing system would print the bills with, "2 cents/unit." I would get calls at least once a week from disgruntled customers, saying they'd been overcharged. Most of the phone calls would end up with the customer hanging up on me in frustration, sure that they were being cheated, because they could not understand that the contract and the bill matched. I actually wrote it out on a piece of paper for someone (.02 = 2/100 of a dollar = 2 cents) and she still could not understand what I meant by all that mumbo jumbo.
… And we wonder why healthcare costs in the US are so bad …
Sure, the debt collector might not have been too smart, but it takes two to tango…
Don’t mean to be as snotty as it sounds, but the OP needs to learn to write a sentence. Capital letters, punctuation and all?
I once put a picture of a piece of cheese in a mousetrap.
Caught a picture of a mouse.
No, no, no.
On his seventieth birthday, the guy goes to the races. At seven minutes past the hour, he goes to the seventh window and puts down $70 at 7-1 odds on a horse named Lucky Seven.
It finished seventh.
Regards,
Shodan
I was in collections twice for healthcare bills. The first time was just a small bill, something like $15, that I had simply overlooked in the flurry. I don’t remember which procedure my husband had done, but the sheer volume of bills was overwhelming–this facility and that doctor and this date and that date. Bills sent before insurance kicked in and after insurance kicked in and because insurance didn’t reply and with discounts for early payment which meant paying before insurance kicked in, etc. They sent the bill once. I overlooked it. They sent it to collections.
The second time was a bill that got submitted twice to my insurance and the doctor (cardiologist’s office) claimed that they were never paid AND that they had sent out dozens of notices–all to the wrong address. So, they fucked up twice, sent collections after me, and thereafter refused to correct it. That one took about 9 months to fix.
So, yeah. This is one of the reasons healthcare costs in the US are so high. We are drowning in paperwork and the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.
Nope–I just couldn’t think of a good way to “illustrate” the sign. My literalmindedness had a hard time submitting the post.
In a similar vein, I was purchasing a $.25 article which was clearance priced at 25% off. The cashier had to call over a manager because “she couldn’t give it to me for free!”. :smack:
And the funny thing is, the collections guy’s (in the OP) last job was at Verizon…
I’m trying to imagine a store that would bother slashing prices on a clearance item worth a QUARTER.
Bought clearance earplugs at Harbor Freight that were down to one cent. Yeah, there wasn’t a percentage off on them, but there was on the stuff at 25 and 50cents.
OTOH, the computer handled it.
Your whole post doesn’t make sense. You say he told you there is a 0.35% annual interest, but they effectively charged you 3.5% (which would amount to the extra $10 over a year), but he is trying to calculate based on a 35% interest rate. When he multiplied 300 by .35, as you said he was trying to do, he would have gotten $105. Obviously to arrive at the $10 figure he would have to multiply by .035 but nowhere in your post do you mention that he ever used that figure. And then at the end when he tells you they “still have to charge the 3.5%”, are you trying to say he acknowledged that his initial quote of 0.35% was wrong?
Basic math is not hard, but neither is basic verbal expression, and you seem to be struggling with the latter.
it was 35% for a year. its only been a couple months, hence the 10 dollars and not the 90-something it would have been for a whole year.
Ohh goodie, an innumeracy thread.
Can I add that I don’t know what “three times cheaper” is supposed to mean? Is this a fraction-phobic person who is trying to say “one-third the price”?