An Austrian player is suing the Bregenz Casino after he was told that the $62,000,000 casino jackpot he thought he’d won would, in fact, not be paid out to him because of a combination between a “software error” and “human error”. After Behar Merlaku and his friends started screaming and hugging following the jackpot announcement, two casino employees approached them and said that they wouldn’t be paid out due to the mishap. The casino further stated that since it was the casino worker’s error and not the casino itself that caused the error (whatever that means?), it owed nothing to the player. To add insult to injury, he was banned from the casino because it is “against the casino’s policy for customers to complain when cheated” (!!) Merlaku is now suing the casino for psychological damaged caused for believing he was a winner, sleepless nights and injustice.
A software engineer, a hardware engineer and a departmental manager were on their way to a meeting. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car’s occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: They were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What to do?
“I know,” said the departmental manager. “Let’s have a meeting, propose a vision, formulate a mission statement, define some goals and by a process of continuous improvement find a solution to the critical problems, and we can be on our way.”
“No, no,” said the hardware engineer. “That will take too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I’ve got my army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car’s braking system, isolate the fault, fix it and we can be on our way.”
“Well,” said the software engineer. “Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again.”
