Set phasers on ka-ching

In the early days of PCs, this small software company develops a warehouse inventory system. "It has lots of bells and whistles, like automatically back-ordering when stock got too low and cutting bonus checks for sales staff," says a pilot fish who remembers it.

A new customer engineer gets the job of installing the system for a midsize company, and to test the system, he creates an inventory database and executes some transactions.

"Being creative, he builds an inventory of things like Klingon battle cruisers priced at $1 billion each, with a few in stock, an Enterprise-class starship, etc.," says the fish. "But after running his tests, he forgets to remove them from the database."

The following year, one of the company's salespeople discovers the Star Trek "merchandise" in the database. It doesn't belong there, that's clear. But no matter how he tries to delete it, the spaceships won't go away.

Until he hits on the idea of "selling" them.

"After selling the Klingon battle cruisers, the system kicks out an order for two more, updates the accounting system and gives the salesperson a multimillion-dollar commission," says fish. "Same when he sells the Enterprise."

That gets the science fiction out of the warehouse inventory. And it takes a while, but the accounting people finally straighten out the books so there's no impossibly huge commission for the salesman.

And after that, the system runs fine-until the end of the year.

"Everything is running okay until they pull a report to find the top-grossing salesperson of the year's biggest sale for a sales award," fish says.

"It was two Klingon battle cruisers and the Enterprise, for a total of $3 billion."