[aij]

That reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent it back in the business-reply envelope. I guess they were happy I had paid my bill because they finally stopped sending them.

[tchalla]

I once read a similar apocryphal narrative. Someone, kept receiving 0$ credit card bills and the company sent repeated reminders with warnings. The person called, sent letters to discuss the situation but to no avail. The person finally gave up and wrote a 0$ check and they stopped sending letters. However, it led to a computer systems crash as the credit card company software encountered a "Divide by Zero" error due to eh 0$ check.

[thomasahle]

I'm having a hard me thinking of a case where you'd want to divide by an amount of money. What am I missing?

[test6554]

>”However, it led to a computer systems crash.”

Reminds me of Bobby Tables

[bryanrasmussen]

Probably the computer that crashed was in charge of sending out letters.

[jfengel]

I receive $0 bills from some sources, and while they don't keep sending them, my bank's website (CapitalOne) does keep reminding me about it as an unpaid bill.

And it won't let me pay $0. I have to mark it as "I paid it myself, outside of your system". That makes it shut up.

[dsl]

Or you might be remembering this story from an email your mom forwarded to your MSN account in the mid '90s?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zero-dollars-and-zero-sens...

[dTal]

There's a golden age sci-fi short for everything:

http://the-eye.eu/public/Books/SciFi_Fantasy/Fantasy/Dickson...

(Computers Don't Argue, Gordon Dickson, 1965)

[wazoox]

However I often had bills and reminders of amounts that hover around postage price. The latest one was a 6.22 euros hospital bill.

[Semaphor]

I had a similar experience. I wanted to cancel my old credit card but couldn't find a way to do it online. As there were no fees I just ignored it. Well, it turned out that my VPN still had it as the payment method and so I got a bill to please pay my negative balance (they require at least 10% to be paid off after a month).

Of course, I paid. But it turns out that I need to contact them to unlock the card after I had a negative balance. I kept postponing it and kept getting 0€ bills every month. After 3 months they told me they are sorry to see me go but they'd have to cancel my account because of a balance of -0€.

It was kinda funny but worked out well :D

[superqwert]

I've tried to cancel a credit card and told I needed to withdraw all money first (I had +£5). I withdrew it, and asked them to cancel it again. They started processing, but by the time they had got anywhere, I'd acquired interest (1p) and they refused to cancel the card.

[yitchelle]

Not sure if this would actually occur but would it be a negative mark against your credit score if they had to close your account due to non-payment of a -0€?

[justinator]

Worked with a guy that was fed up with the phone company, so he kept like a $0.11 balance due in his account, knowing that sending him the letters asking for him to pay the bill would cost the phone company more than the total was worth.

[Ntrails]

I kept a bank account open with £1 for a decade or so as a similar passive aggressive protest

[ankit219]

AWS once sent me reminders to clear pending dues and pay the bills else service will be terminated. The bill was of $0.01.

[jvsg]

yep. Me too. In my case, my bank was unable to process that amount of payment so they eventually had to strike it off my bill.

[aflag]

I kept not paying my debts and just accumulating more and more. One day my debts got so large that it caused an overflow. I now have a couple billion to spare. I'll be forever in debt with whoever did my bank's decimal type implementation.

[MichaelBurge]

Did they ever deposit the check?

[vageli]

Would a bank even accept it? Genuinely curious if it's even possible to register a null transaction like that.

[l0b0]

Sounds like misspelling "139" as "-1E9" could be profitable...