GingerfeedS Presents 10 Typos That Cost Millions Of Dollars
Number One: Hyphens don’t usually score high on the list of most important punctuation.
But a single dash led to absolute failure for NASA in 1962 in the case of Mariner 1,
America’s first interplanetary probe.
The mission was simple: get up close and personal with close neighbor Venus.
But a single missing hyphen in the coding used to set trajectory and speed caused the
craft to explode just minutes after takeoff. 2001: A Space Odyssey novelist Arthur C. Clarke
called it “the most expensive hyphen in history.”
Number Two: A missing letter cost one sloppy eBay seller more than half-a-mill on the 150-year-old
beer he was auctioning.
Few collectors knew a bottle of Allsopp’s Arctic Ale was up for bid, because it was
listed with a single 'P' instead of two.
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.
Number Three: Not even the heavenly father is immune to occasional inattention to detail.
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.
Number Four:.
A plate of tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto would typically only be offensive to a vegetarian’s
senses.
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.
Number Five: . Online trading was still in its relative infancy in 1994, a fact Juan
Pablo Davila will never forget.
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.
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.
Davila was, of course, fired.
And Codelco ended up filing suit against Merrill Lynch, alleging that the brokerage allowed
Davila to make unauthorized trades.
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.
Number Six: 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.
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.
No amount of pleading to the Tokyo Stock Exchange could reverse the error.
Number Seven: And 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.
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.
Unable to honor the debt, the dealership instead offered a $5 Walmart gift certificate for
every winning ticket.
Number Eight: Humans and computers don’t always play well together.
In 2006, New York City comptroller William Thompson admitted that a typo—an extra letter,
to be precise—caused its accounting software to misinterpret a document, leading the city’s
Department of Education to double its transportation spending (shelling out $2.8 million instead
of $1.4 million).
Number Nine: . Not to be outdone, just last month, New York City’s Transportation Authority
had to recall 160,000 maps and posters that announced the recent hike for the minimum
amount put on pay-per-ride cards from $4.50 to $5.00.
The problem?
A typographical error that listed the “new” price as $4.50.
Oops!
Of course, it will only take 100,000 rides on the 6 train to make up the difference.
So straphangers lose (yet again).
Number Ten: Remember the Yellow Pages?
Yeah, well Banner Travel Services would like to forget them.
Years ago, the now-shuttered Sonoma, California-based travel agency decided to market its services
in the phone book ... only to find that the final printing advertised its specialization
in exotic destinations as a forte in “erotic” destinations.
The typo certainly piqued the interest of some new customers, just not the kind of clientele
the company was hoping to attract.
The printer offered to waive its $230 monthly listing fee, but Banner sued for $10 million
anyway.
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