A friend of ours recently showed us her phone bill from Verizon. We understand that the important thing on the phone bill is the big number on the front. You are supposed to copy that number onto your check and mail it to them.
But this phone bill goes on for six or seven pages, enumerating and aggregating monthly service basic, local calls, basic service taxes and surcharges, monthly service non-basic, rate adjustments, non-basic service taxes and surcharges, billing for long distance carrier, miscellaneous charges and credits, direct dialed calls, and taxes and fees on services.
Whew! Sometimes we think that computers are not wholly a blessing. Nobody would cobble up something this complicated and impenetrable without a computer.
Or would they? Our eyes were darting hopefully for any explanatory text to elucidate the foamy sea of tele-speak and numbers when they landed on the following sentence:
We are not making this up. Here's a scan:
Can anyone tell us what this means, or why it takes four (4) negations to say it? Does our friend have to pay those pesky non-basic service charges or not? We got out our copy of Quine on Logic but got lost between "general and subjunctive conditionals" and "alternation and duality".
Elsewhere on the bill we found that Verizon is providing our friend an opportunity to be a Literacy Champion by signing up for a monthly donation to "Verizon Reads".
When they have a box for "Verizon Writes", we might contribute.
Careful readers will note that we don't write any of our own stuff anymore. We steal everything. The title of this post uses a word first brought to us by Xavier Alvarez, quoted here and elsewhere.
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