Humans and computers don’t always play well together. NYC DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION’S LESSON IN BOOKKEEPING Unable to honor the debt, the dealership instead offered a $5 Walmart gift certificate for every winning ticket. But Atlanta-based Force Events Direct Marketing Company mistakenly upped the ante when they printed said scratch tickets, making every one of them a grand-prize winner, for a grand payout of $50 million. The damage: $50 million (or $250,000 in Walmart dollars)Īnd you thought alien sightings were the only interesting thing happening in Roswell, New Mexico! In 2007, a local car dealership came up with a brilliant plan to stimulate sluggish sales: mail out 50,000 scratch tickets, one of which would reveal a $1000 cash prize. See Also: What is Trypophobia? And Is It Real? 7. No amount of pleading to the Tokyo Stock Exchange could reverse the error. Less than a year later, one of the company’s traders made more than a simple boo-boo when he sold 610,000 shares at one yen apiece. In December 2005, Japan’s Mizuho Securities introduced a new member to its portfolio of offerings, a recruitment company called J-Com Co., nicely priced at 610,000 yen per share. MIZUHO SECURITIES SELLS LOW-LIKE, REALLY LOW See Also: 8 Psychological Tricks of Restaurant Menus 6. Merrill coughed up $25 million to settle the dispute-but not before a new word entered the popular lexicon: davilar, a verb used to indicate a screw-up of epic magnitude. And Codelco ended up filing suit against Merrill Lynch, alleging that the brokerage allowed Davila to make unauthorized trades. After realizing the error, he went on a bit of a trading rampage-buying and selling enough stock that, by day’s end, he had cost the company/country $175 million. It all started when the former copper trader-who was employed by Chile’s government-owned company Codelco-mistakenly bought stock he was trying to sell. Online trading was still in its relative infancy in 1994, a fact Juan Pablo Davila will never forget. But an unfortunate blunder in The Pasta Bible, published by Penguin Australia in 2010, recommended seasoning the dish with “salt and freshly ground black people.” Though no recall was made of the books already in circulation, the printer quickly destroyed all 7000 remaining copies in its inventory. PASTA GETS RACISTĪ plate of tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto would typically only be offensive to a vegetarian’s senses. See Also: 11 Smells That Are Slowly Disappearing 4. In 1631, London’s Baker Book House rewrote the 10 Commandments when a missing word in the seventh directive declared, “ Thou shalt commit adultery.” Parliament was not singing hallelujah they declared that all erroneous copies of the Good Book-which came to be known as “The Wicked Bible”-be destroyed and fined the London publisher 3000 pounds. Not even the heavenly father is immune to occasional inattention to detail. The damage: $4590 (and eternal damnation) One eagle-eyed bidder hit a payday of Antiques Roadshow proportions when he came across the rare booze, purchased it for $304, then immediately re-sold it for $503,300. Few collectors knew a bottle of Allsopp’s Arctic Ale was up for bid, because it was listed as a bottle of Allsop’s Arctic Ale. THE CASE OF THE ANTIQUE ALEĪ missing ‘P’ cost one sloppy (and we’d have to surmise ill-informed) eBay seller more than half-a-mill on the 150-year-old beer he was auctioning. Clarke called it “the most expensive hyphen in history.” 2. But a single missing hyphen in the coding used to set trajectory and speed caused the craft to explode just minutes after takeoff. The mission was simple: get up close and personal with close neighbor Venus. But a single dash led to absolute failure for NASA in 1962 in the case of Mariner 1, America’s first interplanetary probe. Hyphens don’t usually score high on the list of most important punctuation. Here are 10 other costly typos that give the phrase “economy of words” new meaning. Google, on the other hand, loves a good typing transposition: Harvard University researchers claim that the company earns about $497 million each year from people mistyping the names of popular websites and landing on “typosquatter” sites … which just happen to be littered with Google ads. (Not to mention plenty of faces as red as the star in the company’s logo.) (It should have read $497.) It didn’t take long for the entire inventory to be zapped, at a loss of $450 a pop to the retail giant. In 2013, bauble-loving Texans got the deal of a lifetime when a misprint in a Macy’s mailer advertised a $1500 necklace for just $47. And not just for those individuals whose jobs depend on knowing the difference between “it’s” and “its” or where a comma is most appropriate.
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