The $500M Dollar Typo

This is interesting, but the telling is fairly vague. It cites a congressional report, which would be interesting to read, but there's no reference that helps me track down such a report.

This is curious but saying that “single typo cost the USPS 500 million dollars” is misleading since they got it all back in the end.

The redundant "Dollar" here bothers me more than it should. I can't help but read it as "The 500 million dollar dollar typo"

In a company a worked for many years ago I was in charge of delivering a weekly report to the board with What went wrong this week, Why it went wrong, How we fixed it, How we are making sure that it doesn&#x27;t break again.<p>I&#x27;d really like to know which checks the USPS added to prevent for something else to cost them $500 M again. OK, there is the usual read the report check which worked on Saturday that time, but it didn&#x27;t happened on time. So, maybe no automation of actually doing the payment at midnight on Friday?

&gt; If a federal employee is accidentally overpaid, the government can only recoup 16.67% of the amount of the overpayment per paycheck pay period.<p>Very curious to hear the story of that rule

TL;DR - it probably cost the Post Office several houndred thousand dollars in internal time to fix this, rather than $500M.

If Cockroach Labs think it remarkable that someone wouldn&#x27;t be fired for a single typo, what does that say about working there?

Guess it was too difficult to just adjust the pay amount (with a deduction) for the next pay period?

I viscerally hate seeing the name of this company. It&#x27;s gross. I have a strong sense memory, and it immediately triggers bad images and smells. My brain just does that.<p>Why on earth would they choose this name? Don&#x27;t they know some nontrivial subset of their customers can&#x27;t handle it?<p>I&#x27;m a CEO. I won&#x27;t question what my team wants or needs if they make the case, but I&#x27;d really have a tough time stomaching a choice for this database vendor. I&#x27;d probably let them use it, but good god...