You couldn’t make it up!
While trawling around some of my favourite maths blogs I came across one from Good Math, Bad Math that left me slack jawed with wonder!
The British national lottery operator, Camelot, recently put out a scratch card game called “Cool Cash”. The rules are simple enough – there is a target temperature on the card and in order to win you have to uncover a temperature that is LOWER than the target.
This has been covered in several other blogs and the Manchester Evening News so I will not discuss it much further but will leave you to ponder the following quote from one confused customer.
“On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.”
Perhaps this is why so many people are in debt here in the UK – they see a balance of -1000 pounds and assume that they are better off than last month when it was only -500.