As usual, when computers make mistakes, it's a problem with design (though there's plenty of that: pity the poor supermarket clerk who has to say, "press the green button" hundreds of times daily). But the design problem here isn't inherent in the online bill system, and it's not about a confusing interface. The problem here is a bigger system, one that uses hundredths. Pennies just don't make sense to most people.
Longtime readers are aware that I have little love for phone companies and their ilk - if a human of any intelligence and empowerment had been involved with processing of payment for more than 100 times the amount due, there would surely have been some sort of contact with the customer before the check had been deposited. (As an aside, there's no technical reason that a computer system shouldn't flag a gross overpayment, and a misplaced decimal point is easy thing to recognize, even for a stupid computer.) But they are a natural outgrowth of our bean-counting mentality.
But back to the pennies. I recall living in a pre-Euro France some twenty years ago, when the smallest coin minted was five centimes, but cash registers rang up single centimes. The French were simply used to rounding up or down as needed. But with the increasing adoption of electronic payment means, followed by the introduction of the Euro and its accompanying one Euro cent coin, that part of French culture has been lost.
Or has it? For this bit of culture survives, nearly universally, anywhere that people reign over institutions and machines. Accountants and banks seemingly live to count the minutiae, slave-like machines know no better. But where people meet face-to-face, the penny is irrelevant. I think of the farmers' markets the world over where the smallest change you'll need is a coin of moderate heft, not some lightweight copper. Real people simply can't be bothered with the pettiness of pennies; it's just so much easier and so much nicer (dare I say human?) to round down the amount or throw in a little something extra to bring up the value.
These odd amounts are the drops of blood extracted from stones by every layer in the (needlessly but profitably) complex systems that mark our modern world. And we do notice, tacitly, as our blood pressure subtly rises when we see the 99 cents tacked onto the price tag. As we generate staggering amounts of wealth from the cumulative effects of our decimal points, I feel an urge to resist, however petty the gesture may seem, to press coins in someone's palms instead of swiping my card.
