Heads and Tales

The Japanese call it fat finger syndrome. It has nothing to do with sumo wrestling but rather the keying errors made by financial traders under severe stress. A trader's number pad will have the usual keys 0-9 and also a couple of extra ones for 00 and 000. These extra keys are an invaluable aid in reducing keystrokes and completing transactions quickly in the frenetic environment of a trading floor. Numbers, especially when dealing in yen, can run to 15+ figures. Unfortunately, these two extra keys, 00 & 000, are located beside one another on the keypad. Imagine you want to purchase 100 shares of company X. The price is right and you want to make a quick purchase before the price changes. You pump the keypad twice, 1 & 00, and hit enter. Unfortunately you don't quite make a clean contact with the 00 key and you inadvertently hit the 000 key as well!! You are now the proud owner of 100,000 shares in company X. The financial tickers on Bloomberg, CNN, et al are awash with the news that company X has been taken over by an unknown Far East buyer.

It's an easy mistake to make you mumble to yourself as you sit on the kerb holding a box of your things that had once populated your desk on the 45th floor of Makushita Towers. And anyway, the mistake was easily rectified the next day.


We are human. It would be quite easy to hit an adjacent key instead of or as well as the intended key.

Maybe you are a woman and you met an old friend for lunch. The next day you get an email from her:

Hey Jane, It was great to see again. By the way, I really loved your vag.

V is beside B on a QWERTY keyboard!

Perhaps things went really well last night with a girl you've been seeing. You took her a Chinese restaurant but the food wasn't great. Nevertheless, you walked her home and she invited you in for coffee. You leave a couple of hours later walking on air and the next day you send her a quick email:

Hi Sweetie, I just want to say that last night was great but I didn't think much of the fuck.

Damn D and F neighbours!

Who is Gregorio Iniguez? Señor Iniguez is the ex-general manger of the Chilean mint. A cushy job, I'd say. There can't be that much to it really. You don't design the notes & coins and you don't actually make them either. That's all done by other people. Your day is pretty much practising your golf putting technique in your office and grooming youngsters on the Internet. So, when a technician brings you some samples to inspect and sign off you do it in a matter of minutes. After all, you know these notes and coins like the back of your hand.

But what do you look for when you're inspecting coins? Well, aside from that the correct monetary value is inscribed, you'd probably check things like the date, the emblems and the name of the country. Unfortunately, for the now defunct general manger, he did not check the latter on a batch of 50 peso coins. Instead of saying REPUBLICA DE CHILE around the circumference, it says REPUBLICA DE CHIIE

As yet, I can't find any reports of this in the Chilean press but it's being reported by American and British media outlets........so it must be true.

What's bizarre about the whole incident is that:

• the guy who actually made the mistake, head franker Pedro Urzúa was not fired.
• the coins have been in circulation since 2008 but was only discovered late last year.
• the coins are not going to be taken out of circulation.

 

It could've been worse, I suppose. They could've mistyped the name of the currency. Imagine asking for 50 pedos.