Confused People at Verizon

After listening to the recording on Youtube of a customer trying to explain his rationale of the difference between $0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents it became quickly apparent that there was a breakdown between the customer and the customer service representative. I had to listen to the recording several times because it was a bit confusing because of the two trains of thought. When the video reached the half way point and he was able to talk to the manager he was how to use bigger values to show the difference between dollars and cents. "1 dollar is different from 1 cent," "Half a dollar is different between half a cent." It was clear that the customer was getting frustrated. The customer understand that there was two different units in question, the customer service people didn't seem to grasp that concept. They were correct in their assumption that on paper the two values look similar. But they are indeed different values.

When we look back Chapter 7 and what we covered in class on decimals we looked at place values: tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. And we also looked as fractions and percents. Since we know that we can work seamlessly between decimals, fractions and percents we saw that when we had a decimal, except Pi, it could also be represented as a fraction. And a fraction was a part out of a whole. In this case the man was disputing the fact that 1 dollar is not the same as 1 cent, clearly, its just dollars and sense. One dollar equals 100 pennies so 1 dollar is 100 out of 100 pennies whereas 1 cent is 1 out of 100. The man was trying to example that $0.002 dollars is not in fact the same as 0.002 cents. The second value is far less than the first. The two values were out of different values. Like the customer stated, there was no conversion.

It is important to teach the concept of decimals to elementary school children so they don't end up like this customer service rep at Verizon. But also on a serious note in this case it would have probably been more helpful to explain that $0.002 dollars is out of one whole dollars and 0.002 cents in out of one whole cent. In that way it is clear that the values are not equal. I don't necessarily believe that the decimal was the confusion I think it was more so the units that were involved. It didn't help that the although they were dealing with money the units were not the same. They should have converted the .002 cents to dollars or vice versa so that they were the same units. Similar to how proportions are setup.