cellio | gas prices

This isn't the business-world equivalent of a Darwin award, exactly (they're still around so far as I know), but the owners of a BP station in Wilmington, NC might need to refine their monitoring practices. On Thursday around 9AM someone accidentally set the price of premium gas at 35 cents a gallon. They had traffic jams all day, requiring police to direct traffic. Only around 6PM did anyone at the station notice why. Somehow I would have expected it to take a lot less than 9 hours to get curious about a sudden, atypical demand. I mean, what would have happened if they'd asked a random customer -- or the policeman directing traffic -- "what's up?"? (The error was apparently discovered when employees called up the chain to ask permission to raise the price.)

(It now occurs to me that, in the 21st century, one of the first avenues of inquiry should perhaps be Google.)

I wonder how the guy who made the error is going to answer the question "why did you leave your previoud job?". Dani suggested "my boss didn't like my typing skills". :-)