Expensive Mistakescoopsweb asks "What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made? Should I mention a certain employee who caused 4 hours worth of delays in Central London and got his company fined £500k?"
No points for stories about the time you had a few and thought it'd be a good idea to wrap your car around a bollard. Or replies consisting of "my wife".
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chthonic, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 11:26)
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50 000 Letters To The Same Person.
Count 'em. 50 000.
When I was a really young Legless, back in the days before PCs (yes, I am that old) I had a job as a trainee COBOL programmer for the AA. (This was in the days when the mainframe filled a room, a disk drive looked like a washing machine, offline storage was on Tapes that looked exactly like the computer rooms in bad sci-fi movies, and the JCL (job control lanuage) was inputted on punched cards. Oh - and I think it was steam-driven.....
Anyway, I was given a program to write that had to search the database for people who met certain criteria and print out a form letter to them offering them more crappy insurance. A piddly, dead-easy prgram. So I quickly wrote it (on coding sheets), submitted it to the punch girls, waited 24 hours and then corrected and compiled it. Ran a bunch of test data through and everything worked and then submitted it to the overnight batch run.
And it ran. And printed out 50 000 letters which were then sent to the post office to deliver.
Now I only made one mistake. One tiny little error. For the geeks amongst you.
I started my count at 1.
Incremented by 2.
Tested to see if count=10.
You can see what happens. Bloody count never equaled 10. Went from 9 to 11 (waving to 10 in passing) and got stuck on the same record. And printed out 50 000 letters to the same person.
Cheers
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Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Sat 27 Oct 2007, 3:21,
3 replies)
I really hopethat you had them send all of the letters.
The thought of some poor bastard three days later is wondrous.
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The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Sat 27 Oct 2007, 3:44,
closed)
What Actually HappenedWas that the company sent them out but they were intercepted by the Post Office who, sensibly, didn't deliver them.
They did, however, charge us for the postage.
Cheers
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Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Sat 27 Oct 2007, 8:06,
closed)
Does cobol not have a 'less than' equality test? Or was it just one of those dozy days that plague us all?
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Slippery Mick ‏, Sat 27 Oct 2007, 11:36,
closed)
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