Price of Cigarettes Just Went Up Again

[Turtle]

In Memphis, TN the price of a single pack of Pall Mall cigarettes will cost you roughly $23 quadrillion dollars. Other brands a similarly priced.

WREG News Memphis Video

From:
Glitch hits Visa users with more than $23 quadrillion charge - CNN.com

"Can I buy Europe on Pump 4?"

A technical snafu left some Visa prepaid cardholders stunned and horrified Monday to see a $23,148,855,308,184,500 charge on their statements.

That's about 2,007 times the size of the national debt.

Josh Muszynski, 22, of Manchester, New Hampshire, was one Visa customer aghast to find the 17-digit charge on his bill. Adding insult to injury, he had also been hit with a $15 overdraft fee.

He noticed that his debt exceeded the world GDP while making a routine balance inquiry on his online Bank of America account. According to his statement, he had spent the profound sum in one pop at a nearby Mobil gas station -- his regular stop for Camel cigarettes.

"Very, very panicked," he jumped in his car and sped to the station.

Had they perhaps noticed any "outrageous" charges come across their books recently, he inquired of the cashier there. She checked the records. They had not.

Muszynski wondered aloud what he might possibly have asked to purchase for such an astronomical price. "Can I buy Europe on pump 4?"

He next called Bank of America, the issuer of his Visa prepaid debit card. The bank kept him on hold for two hours, during which time he contemplated the impossibly bleak financial future that might await him. He also felt a stab of fear that he had saddled all his unborn grandchildren -- and their grandchildren -- with a lifetime of debt. "Down the generational line, nobody would have any money."

Finally, a bank representative told him that the $23 quadrillion charge -- and the $15 overdraft fee -- would be stricken from his account.

Muszynski compared the giant debt reprieve to receiving "an amazing Monopoly card that says, 'Bank error in your favor.' "

For the computer geeks among us, the amount charged shows the type of rookie programming error that caused the problem. 23,148,855,308,184,500.00 * 100 is 2314885530818450000.

Convert 2314885530818450000 to hexadecimal, and you end up with 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 50. Hex 20 is a space. The Cracker Jack C/C++ programmer at Bank of America stuffed spaces into a field where binary zero should have been. What a goober.

 

[Dakota]

I am so glad I quit back in the early nineties, everytime I see the carton prices up near 50 buck geez

 

[dletheridge]

Too bad, they don't write much in COBOL anymore. The language would have stopped that in a heartbeat. And, I would still be in programming. Heck even RPG I,II,III and IV would have stopped that.