Typos are an unfortunate and everyday occurrence. Sometimes they’re the result of people having not paid enough attention back in English class and either having poor spelling or an inability to differentiate between homophones. Sometimes, they’re the hilarious and potentially horrible result of auto spelling keyboards on smart phones.  And sometimes they’re just an honest mistake, a slip of a finger or a lapse in concentration. They’re not always too bad, but sometimes they can cost a company millions of dollars. Here are 5 hilarious and entirely disastrous typos.

5 of The Most Expensive Typing Mistakes

The Missing Hypen – NASA and $80 Million Dollars Lost

Coding and Programming requires precision. A lack of precision can lead to failure. And honestly that’s probably the best you should hope for. Nothing happening is much better than the alternative. Like getting unexpected results that you think you’re correct. Or in possibly the worst case scenario… Exploding. A missing hypen in 1962 led to a catastrophic coding error. One which resulted in the Mariner 1, America’s first interplanetary space probe being forced to blow up just minutes after take-off due to a completely messed up trajectory. Total cost? 80 million dollars.

Online Trading, $175 million lost, and a new word for failure invented.

In 1994, when online trading was still a newfangled thing, Juan Pablo Davila, a Chilean trader who worked for the government owned company Codelco accidentally bought stock he was trying to sell. After realising his mistake and trying to fix the issue by buying and selling accordingly, by the end of the day he had lost the company and by extension the country, $175 million dollars. Rather hilariously, in Chilean Spanish to “davilar” something is to screw up terribly.

One 610,000 yen share? Or 610,000 – one yen shares? $340 million lost          

In 2005, Japan’s Mizuho Securities were offering their shares for 610,000 yen each. Unfortunately less than a year later, one of their traders accidentally sold off 610,000 shares. At 1 yen a piece. 1 yen being the equivalent of 1 Australian Cent, or even less than 1 American cent. Despite pleading with the stock exchange, the company lost millions. It lost even more when its stocks dropped and it came out that they made a huge mistake.

Everyone’s a winner, quite literally - $50 million lost

In 2007, one car dealership in Roswell New Mexico sent out 50,000 scratch tickets with one promising a $1000 grand prize in the hopes of drumming up interest. Unfortunately the marketing company responsible for printing out the tickets marked every single ticket a grand prize winner. 50,000 tickets each with a $1000 payout. A $50 million payout in total. Unable to pay off each “winner” their thousand dollars, the dealership instead offer a $5 Walmart gift voucher for each ticket, which still wound up being $250,000 lost. 

New York City Department of Education needs some proofreading - $1.4 million lost

In 2006, a New York City Comptroller admitted that a typo that was made - one extra letter, resulted in a rather important document being misread by some computer software. The annual transportation budget of $1.4 million dollars was mistakenly doubled, resulting in the city having to make up the difference. Not a great day for the city perhaps, but a great year for the students.

First Seen on: http://mentalfloss.com/article/49935/10-very-costly-typos