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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

Ok this is cool but maybe Vodafone can focus on more customer-oriented things like figuring out how I can pay them the -7000 CZK they've been harassing me about for 2 months. Effectively I overpaid last year (due to their billing stupidity) and now they've been threatening to disconnect if I don't pay them minus US$315-ish. I don't quite know how to do that legally...

Stupid company.

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You just made me realise something. For 10 years, every month I'd received an SMS saying:

> Your latest bill $-0.02 on [... blah blah...]

From a telco provider I no longer use. Turns out they finally stopped messaging me in November last year. I wonder if they worked it out or whether their system gives up after 10 years.

Hopefully you don't have to wait that long!

I wonder if there's a way we could estimate the global power consumption for digital junk mail in units of tons of coal

~ 4-5 million tons of coal (33 TWh in 2009)

- Equals ~1/3rd of Bitcoin's energy consumption (~115 TWh per year, 2022) [6]

- A pile of 8 million tons of coal is ~1/2km (~1/3 mile) in diameter and 167m (549ft) high [3]

- Poland uses 10 million tons of coal a year to heat households (2017) [4]

- Annual world coal production 7,741.6 million t (2020) [5]

33bn kWh [0] = 4.056.268 TCE (Ton Of Coal Equivalent) [1]

33bn kWh / 6.7 kWh/kg [2] / 1.000 kg/t = 4.925.373 t

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/apr/15/spam-mcaf...

[1] https://www.justintools.com/unit-conversion/energy.php?k1=te...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal

[3] https://www.sightline.org/2013/07/03/what-8-million-tons-of-...

[4] https://www.dw.com/en/coal-rich-poland-faces-winter-of-energ... -> https://www.dw.com/en/can-poland-end-its-toxic-relationship-...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_prod...

[6] https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin...

Oh I had the same problem with Vodafone Australia a few years ago. In the end I called them up about it and they sent me a physical cheque for 3 cents - the postage cost more.

Ha hopefully not! To be honest given that home-office is quite important nowadays I'd like to just have some closure. Being told you have to pay an unexpected, positive quantity of currency is annoying but if you want to resolve that it's usually achievable. Being told you have to pay negative amount and that your contract is in jeopardy feels like you're on a bit of a knife-edge. Throw in Czech customer service (lol) and the company either playing games with their systems being "down" when I go, or pretending they can't understand me because I'm a foreigner and my Czech is a little off sometimes - it's a little stressful.

Sorry for the diversion, I'll make another pilgrimage to the Vodafone place nearby tomorrow, it's possible they had "billing our customers negative numbers" above Raspberry Pi fun on their TODO list!

...call their customer support? This is a pretty simple problem to explain no?

Do you really think the outsourced customer support agent paid a few bucks a day is going to 1) understand your problem, 2) care about it enough to investigate it and 3) will be given the tools and access required to investigate it, 4) has a suitable escalation path to escalate what is clearly a billing system bug to the engineering department and that 5) there is actually an engineering department with competent developers working on the billing system and it's not some shitty outsourced big ball of mud acquired a decade ago that everyone is scared to touch ever since.

Oh almost certainly 1-4 suck. I'm not in Vodafone's defense here. Just saying this is a solveable problem if you contact CS enough.

In my experience the only way to escalate is to stop your subscription and tell them why.

They actually have physical branches here but last few times I spoke with them they fobbed me off for a bit then claimed they have had "account downtime" and that they could not service me because they couldn't handle anyone in Czech Republic. After which they dismissed me and serviced the next person. Cool company.

That seems like a great way to make a quick buck out of a libel lawsuit.

Not sure how libel law would apply, they're not like publicly saying shit about me. Just being dumb about billing.

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