I just received a reminder from building management about an overdue maintenance bill.
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I just received a reminder from building management about an overdue maintenance bill. We need to pay it at once, or—if we've already paid it—tell them the check number. Fair enough—but the attached invoice was for $0… Yup—it's 2026 and that sort of thing still happens. (Do I need to dust off my very rusty COBOL skills and offer my services?)
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I just received a reminder from building management about an overdue maintenance bill. We need to pay it at once, or—if we've already paid it—tell them the check number. Fair enough—but the attached invoice was for $0… Yup—it's 2026 and that sort of thing still happens. (Do I need to dust off my very rusty COBOL skills and offer my services?)
@SteveBellovin Send them a check for the billed amount.
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I just received a reminder from building management about an overdue maintenance bill. We need to pay it at once, or—if we've already paid it—tell them the check number. Fair enough—but the attached invoice was for $0… Yup—it's 2026 and that sort of thing still happens. (Do I need to dust off my very rusty COBOL skills and offer my services?)
@SteveBellovin Your only chance of getting off the hook is sending them a check for $0.00.
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@SteveBellovin Your only chance of getting off the hook is sending them a check for $0.00.
@bontchev @SteveBellovin Sometimes that doesn't work because the minimum input amount is 0.01. In that case you need to send a check for $0.01, and ask for a return check in the amount of the overpayment.
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@SteveBellovin Send them a check for the billed amount.
@20002ist @SteveBellovin Remember what happened the previous time someone tried to pay $0 to an utility company? (the story was in one of the books I've read as a CS student, possibly Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" or Dennie van Tassel's "Program Style, Design, Efficiency, Debugging, and Testing")
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@20002ist @SteveBellovin Remember what happened the previous time someone tried to pay $0 to an utility company? (the story was in one of the books I've read as a CS student, possibly Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" or Dennie van Tassel's "Program Style, Design, Efficiency, Debugging, and Testing")
@blotosmetek @20002ist Not Mythical Man-Month. (The manuscript for it was my text when I took Software Engineering from Brooks as a grad student…)
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@blotosmetek @20002ist Not Mythical Man-Month. (The manuscript for it was my text when I took Software Engineering from Brooks as a grad student…)
@SteveBellovin @20002ist Then either van Tassel or Glenford Myers "Software Reliability: Principles and Practices".
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@SteveBellovin @20002ist Then either van Tassel or Glenford Myers "Software Reliability: Principles and Practices".
@blotosmetek @20002ist In one course I took from Brooks (I took four from him, two lecture courses and two seminars, and he was the department chair!), he distributed a dataset for a fake electric company showing many of the bad input data fields the billing system might receive. The variety was staggering…
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I just received a reminder from building management about an overdue maintenance bill. We need to pay it at once, or—if we've already paid it—tell them the check number. Fair enough—but the attached invoice was for $0… Yup—it's 2026 and that sort of thing still happens. (Do I need to dust off my very rusty COBOL skills and offer my services?)
@SteveBellovin I get a bill from the ISP, every month, for $0. I grok why, since the ISP is paid for by the HOA. I think they're just mad they can't get me to buy upgrades. "Let's just spam him."
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@SteveBellovin I get a bill from the ISP, every month, for $0. I grok why, since the ISP is paid for by the HOA. I think they're just mad they can't get me to buy upgrades. "Let's just spam him."
@agreeable_landfall I get those, too, but at least they don't ask me to pay…
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