Time Warner Cable Charges Man $16 Million For TV

Nice to know, or better yet to have it demonstrated so aptly for us, that absurdity is still alive and well in corporate America. That it took forty minutes rather than forty seconds to rectify this is further testament to the lack of intelligence in accounting and customer "service". Human error indeed. Error resulting in sudden unemployment would be a better response.

The fact they actually tried to charge his card in the first place is 100 percent absurd!

It is absurd, the software should have checks built in to prevent this kind of charge and send it to a human to verify. Anything over $800 for a residential customer should raise all kinds of red flags.

Taking 40 minutes to correct the problem is nothing for a case like this.

I'm sure that this issue will get escalated and checks will get put in place.

No one here on this site knows the exact cause of what happened. Why is it that Windows doesn't already have build in measures to prevent crashes? Why isn't it that many systems don't already have measures in place to prevent any kind of mistake? ... because some of them, like many things, could very well be a bug or glitch.

I take it that you've never worked in any customer service field before. It likely took 40 minutes for them to kick it up the chain/find out who could reverse the charges. Over certain amounts need authorization. The fact that it only took 40 min is actually amazing. When I worked CS, anything over $50 was automatically sent to our supervisor, anything over $300 was sent to their supervisor, anything over $500 was sent to the call center manager, anything over that was sent to regional.. and so on. So if you happen to call after 5pm local, it will likely be a day or two before the person with authorization to reverse the charges is available to do so.

Do you really think they give people that answer the phones making min wage the ability to remove $16m worth of charges? I doubt the software can even handle that many digits.

Nice to know, or better yet to have it demonstrated so aptly for us, that absurdity is still alive and well in corporate America. That it took forty minutes rather than forty seconds to rectify this is further testament to the lack of intelligence in accounting and customer "service".

Don't the people who put out the design requirements for the programmers who code these billing systems include any commonsense checks in to their designs. Such an amount should not even have let the program bill such an amount without kicking off a manual, human review of the charge. There should be automatic review processes built in to any billing system.

I wouldn't exactly call this a PR disaster. This isn't like a $10,000 3G roaming bill like AT&T actually tries to make customers pay because they really did rack up the charges. Or it's not like Comcast trying to get someone to pay for 3 missing cable boxes because a tornado destroyed their house.

This is a mistake that was corrected with a 40 minute call to customer service and they never tried to claim that the man actually owed $16 million.

Don't the people who put out the design requirements for the programmers who code these billing systems include any commonsense checks in to their designs. Such an amount should not even have let the program bill such an amount without kicking off a manual, human review of the charge. There should be automatic review processes built in to any billing system.

The billing system is probably older than 1/2 the programmers working on it. Still written in Fortran running on an IBM mainframe. The billing system hasn't been rebooted in 30 years (although every hardware component has been hot swapped in that time).

TWC was testing out the new 'per bit' billing.

Back in the dark ages when I learned to program we put limits or some sort of checks into programs to stop or inform us of numbers that are way out of whack. I guess they don't do that any more???