Free Lunch
Years ago, at a certain major university, the administration decided to put all your services on one card: everything from the library to the photocopiers, to exams and food services. A fine idea. There was just one tiny problem…
The code somehow presumed that everyone would, at some point, put a balance on the card. They did not account for the possibility of someone showing up in certain places with a zero balance. One set of such places involved anywhere that served university-issued food. In short, as long as you kept a zero balance on your card, you ate for free.
You’d get rung in at the cash, and present your card. It would scan but not show the cashier the balance (because of privacy regulations); it would only say “OK” or “not OK”. If you had a balance that was not sufficient, or negative (for instance, in the case of library fines) it would compare X to Y and it wouldn’t go through.
If your balance was zero, it went through every time, so somebody didn’t set up that binary properly. This went on for YEARS. In certain faculties and departments-—and it’s easy to imagine which ones—it was legendary.
It got to the point, I’m told, that they were actually holding meetings and disciplining people who took advantage of it because they were so concerned about keeping it going. It only ended because the university tore out all of its old cafeterias and put new ones in, presumably because the old ones were losing staggering amounts of money.
The new cafeteria had a completely new payment system that did not apparently have this issue. I found out towards the end of my time there, but I didn’t feel too upset because I lived off-campus and only ate within the university inside my college, which was on a different system and had way, WAY better food.
Someone literally said, “How would you like a free lunch?”, showed me his 0.00 balance on a nearby machine, and then bought me lunch. Now that I’m more involved in and aware of university operations, I’m actually kind of angry about this, like all free lunches, it wasn’t, but it remains an undeniably first-class hack.
(Personally, my own view is that student nutrition is a huge problem, and we should be giving food away to students, but the legal problems surrounding that are truly prohibitive).