Seven Digit Dumpster Dive
Good Scan, Bad Read
Imagine throwing something away you thought was worthless, only to later realize that it was extremely valuable. How far would you go to recover it, if recovery wasn't guaranteed?
An unidentified Italian woman recently faced that exact dilemma when she asked a waste management company to help locate a mistakenly discarded lottery ticket — because it was worth a million euros.
One Sunday afternoon earlier this month, the frequent lottery player used an automatic scanner to check her ticket in a shop in Bitonto. When the machine returned a "non-payable" message, she assumed the ticket was a loser and tossed it in the trash. Turns out it was only non-payable at that shop because, really, what corner store keeps a million euros in the cash drawer?
Upon returning home, the woman learned that her regular numbers — 2, 4, 8, 10, 51 — had won the jackpot. The would-be euromillionaire (is that a word) made a mad dash back to the shop to retrieve the ticket, but it was too late. The shop's trash had already been picked up for the day. Determined to collect her trashed cash, she called the head of the local refuse company for help, and he agreed to assemble the Garbage Avengers to locate the ticket...for a fee.
It was Sunday after all.
Actually, the fee wasn't to pay these government-employed Avengers overtime. It was to keep taxpayers from footing the bill for the specialized, multi-step search process. To find the ticket, they'd have to first locate the truck that picked up the shop's trash, re-route its destination from the landfill to a special facility, then dig through a mountain of dangerous waste material — for a piece of paper.
Maybe they really were superheroes.
Although there was no guarantee of recovery, the woman essentially pushed all her chips to the center of the table and agreed — in advance — to fund the elaborate search. The cost was undisclosed, but her (second) bet paid off.
After two long days of digging, one of the waste workers — probably Ant-Man — found the winning ticket intact in a hole-ridden bag full of damaged tickets. Relieved and excited, the team cheered as if they'd won the jackpot — or because it was finally over — and the woman cried tears of joy.
What are the chances someone could win the same jackpot twice in two days?
Probably 1 in that's-never-gonna-happen-again.
Loose News Travels Fast
The woman didn't win the lottery twice. She paid to obtain the winning ticket twice.
She bought the ticket, discarded it, then bought the search that found it in the trash pile. And of those two transactions, the second one cost her considerably more — because of how far the ticket traveled.
When she read it was "non-payable," the ticket went from her hand to the trash can. Had she reached in to retrieve it in that moment, the cost would've been virtually zero. But by the time it was in a trash truck en route to the landfill, the retrieval cost required a coordinated effort to locate the ticket within an elaborate system.
Each time the ticket changed hands, the number of things required to retrieve it went up.
The lottery winner thought everything was normal because nothing was happening on her end. She read the ticket, thought it was a loser, threw it away and went home. But the ticket kept moving.
We see this play out at work too when a seemingly small mistake carries a hefty price to correct the further it travels through the office.
An incorrect data point makes it into a presentation deck. The cost to fix it before you hit send is a quick double check and one keystroke. But after the deck has been forwarded a couple of times, it costs a correction email, four meetings and a lengthy explanation about how we got this so wrong.
You give a quick guesstimate — "about two weeks" — on the time the team needs to complete a task. That number goes into a status update, then into a roadmap which eventually finds its way to the client. Walking it back in the hallway costs one sentence. Walking it back after the client has seen it costs a renegotiation and an awkward conversation about moving dates.
In both cases, information made its way to other people who then took it as gospel. The correction cost didn't rise because of the time that passed or the size of the error. It rose because of how far information traveled.
And you weren't there when it moved.
Question of the Week
What have you casually put in motion that surfaced somewhere unexpected?
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