I love testing things like that. I was a caller for my University's Phonathon. Somebody realized that the software had never been tested, so they asked a numbe

I love testing things like that. I was a caller for my University's Phonathon. Somebody realized that the software had never been tested, so they asked a number of the frequent callers to test the system. I wondered what would happen if I put a negative number in for a pledge. The system accepted the input, but the systems it was tied in to did some really weird things with it. The pledge was automatically marked as completed, because the amount paid (0) was larger than the amount owed (a large negative number). Recognition for gifts isn't based on paid amount though, it's based on amount "credited" to the donor. This makes sure that people get recognized for matching gifts from their companies, but the companies get the tax documents, etc. The recognition amount was stored as an unsigned integer with 4 decimal places. When a negative pledge was entered, an integer underflow occurred and you suddenly were the largest donor to the university by a huge margin. Funny thing was that anybody could have messed the system up, because you could also enter a negative number on the online pledge page as a donor. That being said, professional fundraisers are very familiar with the largest donors at an organization. Somebody would have caught the error immediately, and there wasn't any way to screw up the financials/bank statements, but it was a fun little error to uncover.