"...offered to set up instalments to pay off the bill..."

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19908095

Maybe ET was calling home.

"there's no way to adjust the computer generated bill, but the phone company offered to set up installments to pay off the bill"

That's disgusting

there's no other word for that besides disgusting.

It's a disgusting display of a company turning a horrific blunder on their part into a horribly insensitive and incredibly tasteless grab for money.

If France has any kind of monitoring agency on private company and/or government agency conduct I seriously hope they took a look at that phone company's behavior because whoever thought it was a good idea to suggest "an installment to pay off the bill" should be fired.

Even if they waived the bill it still says volumes about how low this company is willing to sink on account of greed.

The problem was that is was a printing error, not a computer error (the computer generated bill was fine), the support could not see the erroneous bill. So when the unfortunate person called support, then support checked the person's customer profile and saw the real bill amount and suggested installments on that one rather than to see the outrageous amount. Which caused some misunderstandings.

One of the most hilarious misunderstandings of all time...

"You sent me a huge phone bill..." - "We can set up an installment plan if you like!"

It's easy to take a poke at the Phone company.

But remember this is France, which when I last checked was the only country in the world where mobile staff where throwing themselves to their deaths:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/mobile-giant-orange-hit-by-suicide-epidemic-as-10-employees-take-their-own-lives-in-seven-weeks-9206184.html

So they probably did know better and were just doing what they felt they had to do, which is wrong in it's own right I suppose.

Another amusing tale was when Orange wanted to move some of their "Customer Services" staff to the Phillipines.

The British Employees snubbed the offer of about ￡10K a year with a rice and laundry allowance saying that no one could be expected to live on that salary...

Which in Britain would be a fair point, but in the Phillipines they would have lived like kings.

Meanwhile, in the year 4000, her descendents finally have the bill paid off.

Even if she paid a million a year, it'd take more than a million years to pay that off