Early Retirement & Financial Independence Community - View Single Post - The perils of technology-- got a $200 electric bill this month

SecondCor521 · 05-21-2007, 02:50 PM

Nords, glad you got your bill straightened out.

I used to work for a bank, and several times we made mistakes that we desperately tried to hide from the customers. It's never good policy to have your customer's figure out that you've temporarily misplaced a few million dollars. Examples:

1. One time a data entry clerk, attempting to enter a $3.75 customer payment, entered the payment as $3,750,000,000.00. Because of some sort of accounting/auditing thing, said-same data entry clerk couldn't edit/correct/fix the entry, so we had to get IT to write a special program or something to delete the transaction. For a week or two somewhere there was a customer who had a credit balance that was maybe 100x the entire bank's assets.

2. One time they ran the program that paid the bank mortgages from the bank checking accounts twice. Probably temporarily overdrew a few thousand accounts. Luckily they fixed that one before the sun came up.

2Cor521

05-21-2007, 02:50 PM	#5
SecondCor521 Thinks s/he gets paid by the post Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Boise Posts: 1,489	Nords, glad you got your bill straightened out. I used to work for a bank, and several times we made mistakes that we desperately tried to hide from the customers. It's never good policy to have your customer's figure out that you've temporarily misplaced a few million dollars. Examples: 1. One time a data entry clerk, attempting to enter a $3.75 customer payment, entered the payment as $3,750,000,000.00. Because of some sort of accounting/auditing thing, said-same data entry clerk couldn't edit/correct/fix the entry, so we had to get IT to write a special program or something to delete the transaction. For a week or two somewhere there was a customer who had a credit balance that was maybe 100x the entire bank's assets. 2. One time they ran the program that paid the bank mortgages from the bank checking accounts twice. Probably temporarily overdrew a few thousand accounts. Luckily they fixed that one before the sun came up. 2Cor521 __________________ "At times the world can seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe us when we say there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough, and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events, may in fact be the first steps of a journey." Violet Baudelaire.