palordrolap

Sounds like you have some aspect of synaesthesia, but there’s no way to be completely sure about that. Numbers usually come with attached context, which may even be specific to the individual, and can affect how people feel about them whether they have crossed senses or not.

As for me, uh. I like numbers, but I think if I had any feelings about specific ones, practical concerns have long since overridden any of that, so my feelings can’t have been that strong in the first place.

Practical concerns like a preferred number being too quiet or too loud on a volume setting, for example, which people often cite as having to be on certain values with certain properties. Likewise, temperature settings, where that’s even possible to control in the first place.

I’m surprised that got through the vetting process, which I thought existed in most places.

Here in the UK, potentially offensive plates are altered or just plain skipped. There was a sitcom in the '90s that used one such “illegal” plate as an end-of-episode visual punchline, which had, up to that point, only been referred to as a “pornographic number plate”. There’s no way it would have made it onto the road in reality. P one five five OLE as I recall.

To give you some idea of how stringent it is here, back in 2007, one region had one of their region codes temporarily changed to TN from SN so that their plates wouldn’t start with “SN07”, i.e. “snot”. Something similar almost certainly happened in 2017 for the SH region code, but I don’t remember any news stories about that.

If the pricing is itemised, you could price the impossible feature at an exorbitant rate.

Either way, has your company previously sold this feature or is this just a mistaken belief about the existence of the feature that the customer has somehow invented themselves?

If the feature isn’t on any of the customer’s previous itemisations and they’re the ones who made it up accidentally, suddenly seeing it on a new itemisation with a sky-high price tag might make them realise without explicitly telling them, which may or may not be what you (as the individual) want. I assume your boss will get wind of this one way or the other, so you could get them on-side by suggesting this idea.

Is this feature something one of your company’s rivals might be able to implement or is this one of those situations where the feature would literally break the laws of physics? (Or mathematics, etc.) If the latter, it might be easier to come clean to the customer with a full explanation. If the former, your company needs to get on R&D immediately. Consult experts in the field. And that’s where the exorbitant rate comes in.

How much of this your company shares with the customer is down to your chain of command. How much you share with the customer is down to how much it will affect you personally one way or the other.

Lots of ifs, buts and maybes here. Good luck. I think you need it.