Everything’s big in Texas. Even the bills. I hope Richard Redden didn’t suffer heart palpitations when he opened his utility bill and found a demand for $24 billion. Yep, that’s right. Billion. Thanks to a printing error, Redden and more than 1300 Weatherford utility customers this week received billion-dollar electric bills marked as late notices. According to MSNBC.com, Irving-based DataProse, which prints customer bills for Weatherford Electric, said the company was embarrassed by the error.``Obviously, this is not something we are pleased about,’’ said Curtis Nelson, DataProse vice president and general manager. The good news is that corrections are being issued. Weatherford Electric spokeswoman Pam Pearson said customers can expect their correct bills later this month. She said the company's records were correct and showed the right amount.
``I know they raised the rates on kilowatt-hours a little bit,’’ Redden said. ``I guess we shouldn't have run the heater quite so much this month.’’The incongruity of the situation reminded me of the case – earlier this week – of Yahya Wahab, a Malaysian man who received a $218 trillion phone bill and was ordered to pay up within 10 days or face prosecution.
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I reminisced how I used to explain to my children what a vast sum '1 million' was - (that seems like a hundred or so years ago!). I used the 'comparison' method, talking about 'seconds' and 'hours' and 'days', using this conversion table:
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60 secs = 1 min
3,600 secs = 1 hour
86,400 secs = 1 day
1,000,000 secs (1 million) = 11.57 days
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So, in today's climate when we talk so glibly about 'billions', if we used the same conversion table to bring things up to date:
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31,536,000 secs (31.5 million) = 1 year
1,000,000,000 secs (1 billion) = 31.71 years
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That brings on the WOW! factor.
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