Mitch Betts, Miami Herald 1993.
In at least one jurisdiction, that modern-day excuse, "It's the computer's fault," is no longer acceptable.
A federal bankruptcy judge with a sense of humor has cited a NationsBank Corp. computer in contempt of court and fined it 60MB of memory for sending erroneous bills.
The case began late last year when the NationsBank computer sent a dunning letter to John and Margaret Vivian in Miami Lakes, FL, even though the bankruptcy court had excused them from paying the debt.
The bank apologized, "proceeded to appropriately chastise their computer and directed it not to send any more notices to the Vivians," Judge A. Jay Cristol wrote.
But "the rampage of the rogue computer" continued, Cristol said, as it sent the Vivians dunning notices for the next two months. Although the bills showed no balance due, Cristol said, the Vivians were upset.
They wrote a scathing letter to the court asking, "Why can't you or your court get these continuing and very annoying letters STOPPED?" and threatened to take the matter to a federal judge who is a family friend.
Judge Cristol said it was this letter - which "has truly established, beyond all reasonable doubt, that Mr. and Mrs. Vivian have no sense of humor" - that led to the Dec. 8 contempt citation, which was just recently published
Accordingly, the judge fined the NationsBank computer "50MB of hard drive memory and 10MB of random-access memory." NationsBank's attorneys responded by sending the court a hard disk and nine computer chips that exceeded the amount of the fine.
Court documents indicated that the defendant was an IBM microcomputer (model undefined) linked to a Novell, Inc. local-area network. The offending notices were generated by a corrupt database file.