Oh, dear ***! Just. No.
I would hope that this is just a set-up joke, but I fear it isn’t.
1) It isn’t a matter of opinion
2) Most 4th graders should be able to figure it out.
4) Teach them the difference by changing their pay from 8-dollars per hour to 8-cents per hour.
I looked up the original blog post to get the back story – http://verizonmath.blogspot.com – turns out the call center reps were seeing $.002 in print and pronouncing it as “.002 cents” which may be more of a visual processing error than a math error, although its pretty profound that they didn’t catch the mistake, they might have just thought they were talking to someone who was trying to get out of paying his bill.
Here is another verizon story that is pretty unforgiving. http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/22/225259&from=rss