Purple sprouting bank
BARCLAYS Bank has set up its Lombard Street head office with supersmart word processors which know how to spell. Dash away at the keyboard and the machine tidies up for you, automatically taking any surplus 'r' out of 'harass' and putting it safely into 'embarrass'. The word proces- sors have a 42,000-word vocabulary, but it does not include the word 'Barclays'. The programmers forgot it. Consequently, any- one typing 'Barclays' on the Barclays system finds it automatically corrected to the nearest word in the vocabulary. This has proved to be 'broccoli'. Dear Sir, on behalf of — oh, blast, there it goes again. . . . City companies have their nursery nicknames (the Notional Wet- monster, the Comical Onion) and I wel- come the Banco di Broccoli.
Previous page
