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Google Fiber Cuts Kansas City Resident's Internet Access Over 12 Cent Dispute (kansascity.com)
New submitter twentysixV writes: Google Fiber offered a seven-year internet service if you pay upfront for connecting to your house, including taxes and fees. Victoria Tane signed this deal: $300 to connect, plus $25.08 for taxes and fees. Google Fiber internally accounts it as ongoing recurring payments. Kansas then raises taxes. Instead of absorbing the tax increase for customers who paid upfront, Google Fiber books it to the customers. To punish the customer for now being late on paying 12 cents she was not aware she now owed for additional taxes, Google then cut her internet access. According to Kansas City News, Tane tried to pay but Google wouldn't take checks for less than $10. Google reportedly tried contacting her via emails and voice messages, but Tane never saw them. When asked about the incident, Google Fiber issued a statement: "As with any customer who has a balance due, we made repeated attempts to reach Ms. Tane to resolve the matter. Google Fiber values our customers, and we have since worked with Ms. Tane to restore her Fiber service." Google forgave the total, restored Tane's service in less than an hour and credited her account for $30, reports Kansas City News.
On the other hand, nobody at google looks at this sort of thing and goes "waitaminute...", so that "trying to reach her" is also completely fully automated with no human in the loop anywhere, or the humans in the loop aren't actually thinking at all.
This is standard. I changed internet providers about 3 years ago. To close my account, they required me to take my router in to their authorized retailer, and he calculated the final bill and gave me a refund for the unused portion of my last month on the spot. But since 1c coins were made obsolete here about a decade ago, he over-refunded me by 1 cent, following good retail practice of erring in favour of the customer. Every month since then, I've received a bill for 0.01. Obviously there is some human review or sanity check before sending accounts to the debt collectors, as they haven't tried to take it any further than sending me a bill every month in the last 3 years, but it is quite amusing that even with a fully automated email based system, it has to have cost them more than 0.01 to keep doing this for so long.