A nice story from the Register – well, rather a depressing one really – about Camelot, the UK’s lottery operator, having to withdraw a recent scratchcard competition:
According to the Manchester Evening News, to qualify for a prize, punters had to “scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card”. Sadly, as the card had a decidedly wintery theme, this initially-shown figure was often below zero.
…
Among these was Levenshulme’s Tina Farrel, a 23-year-old who admitted “she had left school without a maths GCSE”. She explained: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop.”
…
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I’m not having it.”
They had to withdraw the competition because rather large numbers of people had the same complaint…
Many thanks to Michael for the link.
Ah, Manchester 🙂
Score one for farenheit.