OK, I've been putting some longer and frankly heavier entries up just lately - but sometimes something's just so damned silly you have to tell everyone about it. And if you happen across it on a Friday afternoon (it's afternoon over here anyway) you've just got to spread it around a bit. So today's entry is a shorty.

It's an IT story because it's a computer error. Seems one Friedrich Schiller in Germany has been sent a reminder that he should pay his television and radio license fee. (We have those in Europe, it's how we subsidise the State broadcasting services over here, I'm not sure what the position is in the US.)

He's unlikely to pay, I'd guess. Partly because Herr Schiller is a famous poet, and they can be quite finicky about stuff like money, but mostly because he's been dead for 200 years.

The BBC story has the German company involved admitting they were mistaken. Like they could have said anything else.

It reminds me, though, of some of my favourite computer mess-ups, which are inevitably down to human error with a slight technology overlay. In the late 1980s there was a computer system called a Sinclair in the UK. In the early days of desktop publishing one of the issues came out with a picture caption that read 'type some sh*t in here'. Then there was the London banking institution that specialised in wealthy clients, whose staff hadn't got the hang of mailmerge so the customers all received a letter from the Bank that started 'Dear Rich B*st*rd'...' [that's my censorship, not theirs, in both cases]

OK people, time to 'fess up - what's the biggest mistake you've ever blamed on your computer system?