The problem is that I bet this is meant to be two cents, as in I’m giving you my two cents, but it really written as two-tenths of a cent, ruining the joke.
It’s not supposed to be 2 cents, it’s written correctly as “.002”.
The story is that there have been several people recently who were quoted (by Verizon) a rate of .002 cents per kilobyte. Their bill ended up based on .002 dollars per kilobyte instead.
A lot of confusion has resulted. In particular, a 23 minute recording of a customer talking with a Verizon employee who is confused over the difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents:
This thread revives painful memories of when I was in sixth grade, forty years ago, and the sign at the bakery gave the price of their brownies as “.10¢”
I asked for ten brownies, and tried to pay one cent for them. No one in the store, nor anyone in my family thought I was corrrect.
Let’s see if I can work up some kind of defence for the Verizon call centre people:
The unspoken, but nevertheless strong convention is that the presence of a decimal point in monetary amounts indicates that the unit is dollars, or the local currency unit, assuming that 1.00 is a reasonable base amount in that currency. Subunits of the base currency unit, such as cents, are only expressed in whole numbers. By that possibly unspoken yet well-established convention, “0.002” when referring to U.S money, can only mean 0.002 dollars. If someone says “0.002 cents” it is therefore not unreasonable to assume that they mean “0.002 dollars, expressed in cents”.
Valiant effort, but “.002 cents” is just that. I don’t think anything that explicit can be “reasonably” interpreted differently, especially in the cell business where things are often expressed as cents per minute, etc.
I could almost buy this is if was the more common mistake of saying something like “0.02 cents” or “0.02¢” – you know, expressing the dollar amount but putting cents or ¢ after it. But when somebody says “0.002 cents,” I’m going to think that they mean 2/1000 of a cent, not 2/1000 of a dollar. That extra zero throws everything into chaos, and there’s no reasonable way to guess at what they mean.
I mean, I agree that most reasonable people will realize that, stupidity aside, the grocer or whoever probably meant $0.59 or 59¢ when they wrote 0.59¢, but 0.002¢ is not a common way of writing anything, and I’d just have to assume they meant what they said, there.
No, it was meant to be .002 cents. This is a reference to the fact that Verizon doesn’t know the difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents, given that they quote one (cents) as the per-kB data transfer rate for an American account in Canada and they charge the other (dollars).
“Do you agree there’s a difference between one dollar and one cent?”
“of course”
“Do you agree there’s a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?”
“sure…”
“Now, do you agree there’s a difference between point-zero-zero-two dollars and point-zero-zero-two cents?”
“no”
This isn’t some differing convention, this is just pure stupidity.
