A procurement oversight from the 1970s shows how a single unchecked option can unravel an entire order. According to a reader story in The Register's "Who, Me?" column, a defense-company employee identified as Terry needed 100 meters of RG8 50 ohm coax cable to link two labs with an RF connection. He placed the order with an accredited supplier but failed to notice a checkbox for "partial delivery."
The shipment arrived as one meter of cable, accompanied by paperwork saying the other 99 meters were on the way. Terry's reaction was blunt: the single meter was useless for spanning the distance between the labs. The supplier's mistake was not just an inventory slip—Terry later learned that a junior employee had admitted to sending the one meter as a joke, and was sacked over the matter.
The incident ultimately cost the supplier its accreditation, which Terry described as a consequence he did not find amusing at the time. The anecdote is a reminder that order configuration details, however minor they seem, can have outsized operational and commercial consequences. With only this source available, there is no competing account to compare, but the story itself is internally consistent and attributed to a named reader.