It's your lucky day!
- TAGS:lucky, superstition, systems development, thirteeen
- IT TOPICS:Development, Management
This small company has 12 regional locations scattered around the U.S. -- and it's about to open another one, says a pilot fish in the tiny IT department.
"Each location had to have a unique number in the company's central computer system," fish says. "The first location was 1, and so on up to 12. This would make the next location number 13.
"There were only two of us IT guys in the 150 person company, and the other guy was the one who got to put the new locations into the system. As he was working on it, he turned to me and asked, 'Should I make the new location 14, since 13 is bad luck?'
"I said, 'Let me tell you what is bad luck -- giving a computer an out-of-sequence number for a sequential numbering system.'
"He used 13."
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