December 20, 2008
What Financial System? It's just GIGOs all the way down: The Great Excel Spreadsheet VIA The Daily WTFIn going back previous editions of the spreadsheet, somehow, they managed to send completely idiotic numbers to their customers for three full years (at least). Not a single customer, not a single manager ever noticed the inconsistency for what were supposed to be trivial multiplications; not a single one of them noticed that "The-most-important-figure-on-this-chart-we-base-all-our-decisions-on" was random garbage.
In the end, he found out that whenever Helen needed to create a new row, she would simply copy and paste some random row and then adjust the values. At some point, however, she must have messed up and the spreadsheet ended up in a weird state, with formulas referring to cells in other rows, or sometimes even referring to nothing, creating a whole bunch of inconsistent values.
Excited at the chance to clear his name, Maxim revealed his findings to the lead analyst. However, instead of relief, he only shrugged and responded "Hmph... well, we usually just use our gut for recommendations, anyway."
Posted by Vanderleun at December 20, 2008 12:19 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.