Adam Savage uses Twitter to fight $11,000 phone bill

Yes, that Adam Savage. The Mythbusters co-host recently ran afoul of some dubious accounting on the part of AT&T when traveling in Canada recently.

According to Savage, he had done a few hours of web surfing with his laptop and USB mobile modem while staying in Montreal with his wife. Upon their return to the U.S., his cellphone had stopped working. When he called to figure out what was going on, he got the shock of his life.

According to AT&T, he had racked up $11,000 of roaming data usage. At $0.015 per KB, he would have had to transfer about 750MB of data, a fact Savage disputes.

“I have a hard time imagining that was the case,” Savage said in an interview with Canwest News Service from Los Angeles. He said he surfed the web for “maybe two or three hours” in total, but said he wasn’t watching any YouTube videos or downloading any pictures or videos. “I feel like, quite honestly, it could be a missed decimal point,” he said.

Within hours of posting about it on his Twitter feed, AT&T was the second most discussed topic on that network – behind Michael Jackson.

That got the attention of someone at the mobile network giant, prompting Savage to Tweet: "...they've taken care of everything to my great satisfaction."

Which is great if your Twitter feed has 50,000 followers, but what about the rest of us? Savage agrees that it shouldn't just work when the company is at risk of bad press. But the resulting chatter about celebs vs. twits has drowned out another, possibly more sinister issue...

Part of Savage's initial complaint stems from AT&T's quoted roaming rates for data, explaining: "I got the 'data is charged at .015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb'. About to try to explain the difference to them. Sigh."

Savage is not alone in the fight against service provider Math. Their inability to discern the difference between $0.002 and 0.002¢ has spawned a rash of blogs and websites revolting against industry giant Verizon. One exasperated customer has even posted a clip of his conversation with the Telco's customer service monkeys. That clip has reached #45 in all-time comedy hits on YouTube.

So if the furore over preferential treatment for celebrities ever dies down, I hope the Twittersphere turns its attention to Verizon and AT&T's mysterious shifting decimal place. Because if they're quoting data rates in cents and then mathemagically charging 100x that amount come bill time, I think they've solved that country's current economic crisis.