There are large phone bills and then there are insane phone bills. Solenne San Jose, a woman from Pessac, in the Bordeaux region of France, received an utterly insane one.
After she terminated a contract with the phone company Bouygues Telecom early, San Jose was told that she would have to pay a cancellation fee. The exact amount would be sent in a final bill to her home in late September, the company said, according to the French news provider Sud Ouest.
The bill she received was for a mind-blowing €11,721,000,000,000,000, the Herald Sun reported. That's around $15 quadrillion.
"There were so many zeros I couldn't even work out how much it was," San Jose told Sud Ouest. And though it seemed like an obvious billing mistake, San Jose had a hard time convincing the phone company that was the case.
According to Sud Ouest, representatives at Bouygues Telecom initially insisted the amount -- nearly 6,000 times larger than France's 2011 GDP -- would automatically be withdrawn from her bank account.
A few undoubtedly stressful conversations with customer service later, Bourgues Telecom acknowledged Solenne would only be billed for €117.21. According to the Christian Post, officials attributed the outlandish bill to a printing error.
San Jose isn't the first person to have been shocked by a cell phone bill, though her bill is one of the largest we've ever seen. John Gibson, a Canadian resident vacationing in the U.S., was hit with a mobile bill for nearly $11,000 after he let his grandchildren stream several Netflix movies during a family vacation. Maria Francis, a Sacramento woman, was slammed with a $1,558.95 bill from Verizon after returning home from a vacation abroad.
These stories are a good reminder that it's important to check your bills before automatically paying them at the end of the month.
