Two young parents in the Belgian province of Antwerp nearly suffered a heart attack when they received an annual gas bill of more than 26 million euros (approx. 37 million Canadian dollars) due to a simple mistake.
“I didn’t know where to turn. We don’t use a lot of gas. Our daily shower only lasts about seven minutes. […] 26 million euros? With such a sum, it is enough to trigger a heart attack. My heart was racing,” Nick Van Hoeydonck said in an interview with German media house HLN, according to Belgian media 7sur7.
After taking another half-hour break from work to pull himself together, the man called customer service to find that a simple error had crept in while entering his consumption data.
In fact, if the father had to ignore the last three decimal places, he would have indicated that he used 10,772,407 cubic meters of energy instead of 10,772 cubic meters. It would therefore have cost him 6.56 million euros per month for the coming year, the equivalent of more than 9.4 million Canadian dollars.
But after the correction, the man would have started breathing again.
“The simulated gas balance then suddenly amounted to 1994.25 euros (approx. 2860 CAD). It made me smile,” he commented, according to 7sur7.
Normally, a warning would be displayed “if the meter reading deviates from normal consumption”, but the customer can “ignore” the message, according to the gas company Luminus.