back to article Casino cops are coming if we can't move all this cash in a hurry

Welcome again to On-Call, El Reg's Friday foray into readers' reminiscences of things that went wrong in the night. This week, meet “James” who once worked “for a company that provided accounting systems for Las Vegas casinos.” As James reminds us, “Casinos, or 'gaming' as it's called in Nevada, are a 24/7 operation and never …

  1. ecofeco Silver badge
    Coat

    Thus proving..

    ..that throwing money at a problem doesn't always solve it.

    ----------> just fill the pockets and I'll be happy.-------------->

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Thus proving..

      But throwing money off a problem does?

  2. Allan George Dyer
    Holmes

    Awesome, truely awesome

    We've had so many 'ventilation blocked by X' stories, but I don't think anything: dust, manure, deceased rodents; will beat this.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Awesome, truely awesome

      We've had so many 'ventilation blocked by X' stories, but I don't think anything: dust, manure, deceased rodents; will beat this.

      I once heard a story of a rat, who sneaked into a particle accelerator while it was being refurbished. Once the maintenance was complete and the vacuum inside restored, he became a much bigger, vacuum-dried and vaguely cube-shaped rat - and promptly blocked the beam. After much prodding a cussing, he was discovered in one of the chambers and extracted.

      One of the engineers involved had the remains epoxy-coated, and kept it above his workbench as a curio. Apparently if the right side of the grey cube was facing you, you could still make out the outline of the very surprised rodent face.

      1. M7S

        Re: Awesome, truely awesome

        The chap with the rat, by any chance a fan of Bonsai Kitten?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Awesome, truely awesome

          I always thought that a rat caught in a particle accelerator would become some sort of super hero. Perhaps even go on to call itself Roland and save C4.

          I'm sure I've seen this kind of thing on TV, have we all been deceived?

    2. Captain Scarlet

      Re: Awesome, truely awesome

      What about Flour?

      I used to work at a flour mill and a PC behind a panel stopped working, wasn't supported by us but agreed to have a look.

      Taking the panel off realised it wasn't a panel pc, a tower pc was behind and it was filled with fine flour dust (Tower pc was half popping out of it), as always I'm amazed at how long pcs in these conditions will often be last.

      1. Sandtitz Silver badge

        Re: Awesome, truely awesome

        "...and it was filled with fine flour dust (Tower pc was half popping out of it), as always I'm amazed at how long pcs in these conditions will often be last."

        I've also baffled how much metallic dust computers can intake while still functioning well. The sure way to kill these computers is then to blow the dust away and ensure that some of it gets into critical niches and end up short circuiting the whole thing - so let it be!

        1. Jeffrey Nonken

          Re: Awesome, truely awesome

          In that case, suck, don't blow.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If their New Year truly exceeded any and all expectations, then they probably had the biggest day in their history: a day literally beyond all experience for them.

    Live and learn. Sound like it's time to invest in a vault.

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Maybe.

      Or maybe they had the dad of the hapless casino owner buying repeatedly stacks of chips with cash until the vault fills up so that the casino does not declare bankruptcy when it has to pay interest on its loans on the next business day.

      That, of course, is a purely hypothetical situation. Never ever happened you know.

      1. Charles 9

        Which wouldn't have made sense since December 31 would've been a Saturday, and when due dates fall on a weekend (and it would make sense to have the due date on the end of the calendar year because tax reporting switches with the new year, too), you often have to pay up on the LAST business day before then, meaning it would've been due on the previous Friday, the 30th, and this would've been too late.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Kiting

          Oh, I don't know about that end of the year thing. Might not be a problem if they were doing some check kiting to cover their payments. Of course, that's highly illegal in quite a few countries. Doesn't stop it from happening, though.

          The wife worked for a guy who was kiting about US$400M quite regularly. It all came tumbling down, eventually, when he was forced into bankruptcy. But, she got to talk to a lot of interesting men and women from various TLAs (Three Letter Agencies; e.g., FBI, SEC, etc.). Fortunately, she was just a low level accountant, and the owner had the good sense to die before they brought criminal charges against him.

          Strangely, they never did account for about US$40M from that company. Sadly, we certainly didn't end up with any of it (They actually shafted her out of a couple of weeks of vacation.). I wonder if the missing funds were because of that industrial-sized shredder that they had running in hyper-overdrive for the week previous to the bankruptcy filing?

    2. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      Sound like it's time to invest in a vault.

      Might be too late. New Year's day 2017 is a Sunday...

  4. wolfetone Silver badge
    Coat

    Clever

    You throw in the whole date thing, and I immediately think "Y2K bug, Y2K bug".

    But no, what we have here was a Flash Cash Crash.

    1. Adam JC

      Re: Clever

      Could have been worse.. Flash Cache Crash!? ;-)

  5. Your alien overlord - fear me

    I hope his call out fee was pro-rata the cash in the cage !!!!

    1. usbac Silver badge

      Unfortunately I don't think so. Having worked IT for a very large casino myself, I can tell you that they pay shit, treat you like something worse than shit, and expect you to live there 24/7. If you have the "nerve" to go home to sleep a few hours every few days, "you are not a team player".

      After 26 years in IT, that was the very worst job I have ever had. To see the pallets of cash coming in every day, then to get paid crap and treated like property, you want to get out of this hell on about your second day there!.

      1. Adam 1

        And here I was thinking that casino's were benevolent organisations looking out for the little guy.

  6. hi_robb

    good on that techy

    He was right on the money...

  7. adam payne

    Hope he got a bonus for that.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh, that's an easy fix

    Take these bags out of here and put them into the back of my car. I'll dispose of them for you with no additional charge.

  9. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    Interesting

    So this wasn't a computer failure. It was a security error.

    1. Swarthy
      Trollface

      Re: Interesting

      It was a Storage issue. They should have gone to Hyperconverged DevOps (apparently).

      1. Graham Dawson Silver badge

        Re: Interesting

        They already were. By merging the management of long-term storage, operations and infrastructure, they found they were suddenly swimming in cash.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sounds like a stack overflow problem.

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