Re: I call bullshit
1: He never said "narrow minded". Living in a narrow world is very different.
2: These stories happened a long time ago and the reg readership is very large. If you've got 40 years of experience to draw on from a million users, it's entirely possible to get 52 stories a year. And people continue to make cockups today which may well become publishable stories in a few years time.
3: Just because you haven't read something in the media, doesn't mean it hasn't been published. Again, bear in mind that it may have been published 40 years ago in a foreign country.
4: Banks were some of the earliest adopters of computerisation. They had to devise best-practice themselves. A lot of what we consider obvious now wasn't at the time and they will have made many mistakes as part of the learning process. Thankfully the state of the industry has improved and lessons learned spread (largely through stories like this being told to colleagues down the pub) such that major cockups are far less major or frequent now.
And yes, I saw some absolutely shocking practice in the bank I did some work in a long time ago!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
