Telling someone they owe trillions of dollars is blamed on a word-processor
WSB-TV in Atlanta has the story of a bank letter that would worry anyone – it said the customer owed over $211 Trillion US dollars. That’s more than the cost of the Iraq War (in fact 70 times the US Federal budget).
Wachovia Bank sent the letter to a customer with a recently closed account, saying that the account was overdrawn to the tune of $211,010,028,257,303.00 .
The bank blames a ‘word-processing error’ for the problem. Presumably the letter wasn’t manually typed, unless there’s a bank employee lacking in basic numeracy and sense to realise the number was extreme.
More likely it’s a standard ‘mail merge’ letter gone wrong – though you have to wonder why the large number didn’t trigger some alert in the banks system.
These stories come up from time to time, funny for most people. For anyone doing mail merge letters from external ‘live’ data it’s a reminder that it’s a good idea to put in ‘traps’ for amounts that are too large or too small.
