All of us have made a small mistake at one time or another, and most of the time it doesn’t turn into anything more than a minor problem. For this reason, the average person doesn’t generally worry too much about paying hyper-focus to detail, at least in most situations. However, there are some cases where a mistake can cause more than just a small problem. Sometimes, one minor error or one single lapse in judgment can cost billions, or lead to the death of thousands. Or, in some cases, potentially both.
10. Casually Using The N-Word on A Conference Call Has Serious Consequences
Papa John Schnatter has become a case study in how not to talk at a conference call, to avoid marketing disasters. Back in May of 2018, he had been clarifying some earlier comments he made blaming the NFL for not doing enough about the protests regarding the national anthem when he decided to casually throw out the n-word — along with some other off-the-cuff comments many found offensive. Schnatter tried to explain that he was trying to show his antipathy towards racism, and not that he was being racist, but the damage was done.
While Schnatter may have been worried about lost pizza sales due to decreased NFL viewership, his company soon had a much bigger problem. In July, the first month after the news of what he had said sunk in, sales in Papa John’s stores dropped 10.5%. To make matters worse, the company projected that this would likely be consistent for at least the rest of the fiscal year. As for Schnatter, while he still has a lot of stock in the company, and no one can just take that away from him, the controversy ended with him losing all the power he once had within his own company.
9. A Small Accounting Error Caused A $4 Billion Discrepancy For Bank Of America
Back in 2014, Bank of America found itself in hot water with regulators and was forced to suspend some payout plans while they sorted things out. You see, it turns out that for five years, Bank of America had been accumulating losses, and had not been reporting them to the regulatory authorities. This was no small amount either: It turned out that Bank of America had $4 billion of unreported losses, which was something they could handle but was also a very significant sum of money to lose.
The excuse from Bank of America? Their accountants just got confused and missed it, simple as that. So, how did they manage to lose this much money until an internal review found it five years later? Well, it gets into some fairly complicated financial rules that even accountants don’t necessarily like dealing with, but the short version involves their acquisition of the troubled Merril Lynch. When they did this, they took on their debt, but they did not need to report it as a loss, as it was considered unrealized debt — at least until they sold it. The problem is they started selling the debt, finally realizing their losses, and their accountants didn’t realize they needed to report it.
8. The Japanese Stock Market Had To Cancel $6 Billion In Transactions Due To A Small Error
The Japanese Stock Exchange is the second biggest in the world, and Japan is known for having excellent technology as far as most of the world is concerned. So it may be a surprise to some to know that Japan has had multiple instances where their antiquated stock exchange system cost people gigantic sums of money. However, the truth is among stock traders and technology experts, the issues that Japan has had in the past with its stock exchange system are well known, and they have been under fire for not having properly updated systems as far back as the early 2000s when some of the worst errors began.
In 2004, the first major cracks started to show when a single error caused a loss of $330 million. The error was a mistake by a clerk entering a number by hand into the system for an ew stock that was coming out, marking it as selling for a dollar a share, instead of several thousand dollars per share. Then, in 2014, a fat finger error by a broker who accidentally made 42 transactions and then immediately canceled them, caused such a mess the Japanese stock exchange had to cancel over $6 billion worth of transactions.
7. You Should Be Careful With Translations When Deciding To Nuke People
Mistranslations can create some of the worst misunderstandings in the world, but there has never been a greater tragedy caused by mistranslation than when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on two populated cities because of a double translation failure. It all started near the end of the war when the Allies sent terms of surrender to Japan, and then waited hopefully for a reply that would not mean more war. If the Japanese did not comply, they were prepared for very aggressive measures to ensure they did so.
The Japanese government needed some time to decide, as the terms were strict and unconditional, but reporters wanted to know where things stood. A reporter asked the Japanese premier how he felt about the proposed terms, and he used the Japanese word Mokusatsu, trying to give the age-old response of “no comment.” Unfortunately, the word he chose was not a great choice, as it can mean silence, but it can also mean “to contemptuously ignore.” The reporter made the mistake worse by assuming the rude version and not even asking for clarification. She took her bad translation back to America with the results we all know too well. The story is now taught in some schools as a way to teach kids about miscommunication.
6. Missing A Hyphen Can Have Tragic Consequences When Working With Rockets
Have you ever been programming and forgot a single parenthesis and spent hours tracking it down? Or perhaps you sew, and once spent hours trying to find that one stitch that was out of place. Tiny little mistakes in life can be irritating, and make us spend hours of our valuable time doing something stupid and mostly pointless trying to fix or even find the problem. However, no matter how many times we have made a small mistake that caused us an inconvenience — or perhaps even cost our workplace money — most of us can rest easy knowing we never caused $80 million worth of damage because we missed a single hyphen.
The incident we are referring to is the loss of Mariner 1, the United States’ first major attempt at an unmanned rocket to explore Venus. It was in the early days of space exploration, back in 1962, which meant eighty million dollars was worth closer to $640 million today. Mariner 1 went up, the misplaced hyphen caused its guidance systems to fail, and they were forced to abort the mission by destroying the rocket. In the end, over half a billion dollars was launched into the air, and it didn’t even last five minutes.
5. If Not For A Single Mistake, The Crossing Of The Delaware May Have Failed
The Crossing of the Delaware was one of the key moments in the American Revolution and has been immortalized forever in an iconic painting we all know. On Christmas night, Washington and his men snuck across using three different crossings and surprised the Hessian troops on the other side. Many like to talk about how the element of surprise was what won them the day, and there are even claims the Hessians were drunk from Christmas, although there is no proof of this. The truth, however, is that while Washington did his best to keep it secret, spies found out and warned the Hessian commander.
The commander, General Rall, simply did not take Washington, or his band of men seriously. He thought of them as little more than a rabble, that his men could take without a fuss, and did not believe he was dealing with a real threat. Then on the day of, he received more messages from spies that an attack was imminent, but refused to fortify defenses or amp up security patrols. Instead, he simply told the spies they would meet the Americans with bayonets. In the end, one man’s casual arrogance led to one of the greatest defeats in military history.
4. People Think We Avoided Y2K, But The Labor Cost To Save The World Was Massive
Back at the turn of the millennium, many people were worried about Y2K, and how it might cause severe consequences or even the end of the world. Those who thought the world was going to end were a bit over the top, but the truth was that we were far closer to disaster than most people realized, and it was a very serious issue. While it was unlikely to cause a nuclear weapon to accidentally launch or something tragically similar, there was a very good chance that financial systems and other computer systems could suffer huge errors and glitches that had the potential to cause untold economic harm.
The programmers who had caused the issue in the first place simply never thought their programs would be used decades later, and had given no thought to the mess they created for future generations. Thus, one of the greatest concerted efforts in modern human history, or perhaps human history as a whole, began. Programmers worked around the clock, manually switching out line of code after line of code, doing a tedious but necessary task to prevent disaster. Fortunately, they did manage to switch out the code in time, but that doesn’t mean the whole mess wasn’t costly. The labor costs to manually switch out all the code in time have been estimated at $100 billion.
3. The Bay Of Pigs: Time Zones Are Important For Invasion Planning
April 17, 1961, is a day that lives on in infamy as the day of the biggest screwup the CIA ever had and as something they dubbed a “perfect failure”. The plan was to take out Castro’s air fleet with a quick bomber strike, and then land an amphibious force of roughly 1,400 Cuban exiles. These men could be later supported with additional air support and the cover of a smaller attack on the other side of the island. Unfortunately, with a complex plan, there are more points of potential failure, and this became very apparent when the operation began.
Among many mistakes, things went badly wrong just as the mission began. The bomber strike failed to destroy all of Castro’s bombers, leaving him with six, and plenty of air support. Then, the amphibious force suffered problems with unexpected coral reefs when landing. Things went from bad to worse, when Castro’s air support started tearing them apart, so they asked for backup air cover. The day may still have been won, but the air support arrived an hour late because of a misunderstanding of the time zones between Cuba and Nicaragua. To add insult to injury, the late-arriving air support had to fight alone and was easily destroyed.
2. Forgetting To Convert Units Has Dire Consequences In Space
In 1999, after 10 months of travel through space and countless expensive man-hours spent keeping an eye on its progress, the Mars Climate Orbiter reached its destination. It should have been a super happy day, but instead of a time of celebration at NASA, it became a day of loss and frustration. The Mars Climate Orbiter was given instructions for landing, and instead of landing properly, it crashed into the surface of Mars. So how did NASA lose a $200 million orbiter and all those man-hours?
Well, the investigation found that there had been some confusion between NASA, and Lockheed Martin, who were both working on the orbiter. NASA was working with metric units, while Lockheed Martin was using American units for their data, and neither realized what the other was doing. This meant that on the day the Orbiter was supposed to land, the instructions they gave it with data from Lockheed Martin were not converted from the American units Lockheed Martin had used. This simple miscommunication and failure to convert units led to an expensive orbiter completely failing to do what it needed to do at the most crucial moment.
1. The Most Expensive O-Ring Mishap In History
On January 28, 1985, it was a colder than normal morning at Florida’s Cap Canaveral, but no one was bothered by the cold because excitement was in the air. The Space Shuttle Challenger was about to launch, and it was going to be broadcast live on TV for the whole world to see. Many schools across the United States had kids watching in the classroom as it was a huge educational event. Teachers also got to showcase one of their own, as a teacher was going up on the shuttle to inspire the public. Then, just 73 seconds after launch, tragedy occurred and the shuttle disintegrated on live television — killing all inside.
An investigation was launched, and it was discovered that one o-ring acquired a fault due to the cold temperatures that morning. Whether the blame was mainly those at the top who felt under pressure to launch on time, or partly due to engineers who were afraid to voice their concerns has been picked over every which way over the years and there are various popular viewpoints. However, what is clear is that the United States lost a 3.2 billion dollar shuttle, traumatized a generation, and lost eight lives, including a school teacher and seven astronauts.