I Used To Be A Millionaire

A few years ago when we were sorting out our bank loans we were millionaires thanks to the wrong press of a button on our banks side, but was was quickly fixed. Yesterday it happened again!

As I was sitting in the couch I decided to check our bank accounts. And as I was checking our funds that’s what I saw – we were millionaires! Of course I know exactly how much should be in each fund so I quickly realized that somewhere it had been multiplied by a factor of over 100. I know exactly how much but I’m not telling since that’s none of your business and it’s irrelevant to the question of how the hell this happend? If it was a factor of exactly 100 you’d just assume someone missed where the seperator between dollars and cents goes, but this wasn’t an even 100. It was a interestingly a prime so not even at all except that it was an integer. And as the programming nerd I am I was asking how did this happened? And considering our entire society is based on systems like this to keep working it’s kinda scary how it could make me into a millionaire just like that. And if it wasn’t a fund that takes two days to sell I would easily have transferred money from the account to the real one but that just wasn’t possible.

And this morning when I checked it it was back to normal. I will mail them and ask “what the hell happened here” but I’m not expected any answer, not anything more than “it was a glitch” when I wanna know the exact glitch. Only thing I can think of is that the file the system was importing and reading had a line missing resulting in it importing the wrong fund values for the funds which would result in this. Which of course begs the question “who can an import routine accept an input over 100 times what it should be?”?

But yes it was easy for the mind to wander off into the “what if it’s real?”-zone. Because for me it was easier to explain our funds increasing the value of a factor greater than 100 than a program glitch this big! And it was a pretty picture of my wife sitting in our greenhouse enjoying coffee and her creations while I work 50% for the rest of my life. But you also know that the entire economic system in Sweden is built to stop people like me from becoming millionaires. And once again that theory was proven correct.


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stoff

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