Counting sheep not beans

Counting sheep not beans


For any of us who’ve worked late nights (or dreaded all-nighters), it is a scenario of nightmares that you fall asleep on the keyboard and wake up having sent something you didn’t mean to or deleted something you were working on. We can then only sympathise with one hapless German bank clerk who fell asleep at his computer with his finger pressed on the number two key. Whoops. The clerk was in the middle of transferring 64.20 euros (£54.60) when he dozed off with his finger on the keyboard, resulting in a transfer of 222,222,222.22 euros. Just a small error then!

Unfortunately for his supervisor, an employee at the bank since 1986, she failed to spot the erroneous transaction and was dismissed. The German tribunal who heard a claim from the supervisor for unfair dismissal, was told that the supervisor had apparently checked 812 other documents for mistakes on the day of the incident, with most documents taking just over a second of scrutiny. Thankfully for her the tribunal sympathised with her position and found in her favour holding that she should have been given a second chance, not just dismissed.

And there’s a happy ending all round, because fortunately for the bank in question, another colleague later spotted the payment error and it was corrected. So no point checking your account for a euromillions style windfall!