text: A part-time worker had the shock of her life after she was ordered to pay more three quadrillion pounds in pension contributions. The blunder at the pensions office in Essen, in the North Rhine-Westphalia area of Germany saw a letter sent out the woman asking for £3,351,978,728,190,661. The bill is more than a thousands times than the whole of Germany's annual gross domestic product. How much is one quadrillion? This graphic shows what one quadrillion pennies would look like stacked on top of each other. The block would dwarf the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Empire State Building and London's Shard . The £3.35 billion is also enough to pay the UK government debt nearly 2,000 times over. In fact, the customer's real contributions should only have been around a few hundred pounds. A quadrillion, is a thousand times one trillion, (a million times a million) in the American system. So a quadrillion is ten to the power of 15 or 1,000,000,000,000,000. In the British system, one quadrillion is ten to the power of 24 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. However, in most English speaking countries, including the UK, the American system is the accepted. A spokesman for the office said the mistake was made when a pensions office worker accidentally copied a customer number into the form, rather than the amount outstanding. 'Yes, the letter did in fact go out like that,' pensions office spokesman Wolfgang Buschfort confirmed to The Local on Wednesday. 'As far as I know, this is the only time anyone has been called on to make such a large incorrect payment. The error was spotted before the office attempted to debit the massive sum from the bank account of the woman, from the Schwarzwald in Baden-Württemberg. Mr Buschfort added that with 26,000 employees working at the pensions office, mistakes were inevitable. The only evidence of the blunder that remained was the eye watering 16 figure demand letter. A part-time worker had the shock of her life after she was ordered to pay more three quadrillion pounds in pension contributions .
target: A woman was accidentally ordered to pay £3.35 quadrillion to her pension .
  Massive sum is more than the entire Gross Domestic Product of Germany .
  Blunder by pensions office was discovered before any money was taken .