The Comp.Risks digest contains some interesting notations. The first one is to suggest that it is not a good idea to write a cheque on your birthday since you will probably enter the date of your birth on the cheque rather than the date of the day. I can understand that. More of interest is this issue which details some of the issues with the United computer outage in the USA. According to AP and Reuters, “Computer Glitch Delays United Air Flights In US, 3 Jan 2006 United Airlines’ domestic flights were delayed up to 90 minutes Tuesday night because of an outage in the computer system controlling United’s check-ins and reservations, which went down for about five hours around 5 p.m. CST Wednesday.

There were huge problems according to the Comp.Risks WWW site. TSA security personel would not let people to the gates even if they had reserved seats on planes if they did not actually have an issued boarding pass. They were allowing planes to leave half full since they did not prioritize the checkins depending on which flights were leaving. Basically it appeared to be a huge disaster for all concerned.