Wasn’t Banking On Winning The World Cup

I work in recruitment, and part of my job is to organise the reimbursement of people’s travel costs when they attend an interview. One day, shortly after Germany was knocked out of the World Cup, an interviewee filled in an expense claim for two nights in a hotel before and after her interview. I processed the request as normal and everything seemed fine, but after a couple of weeks she got in touch asking for an update on her claim. According to payroll, the full amount had been paid, but she insisted she hadn’t received it.

She became increasingly upset over the course of several days as we emailed back and forth, with me providing evidence that the payment had been sent, whilst she sent evidence that her bank had never received the money. Eventually, I asked payroll to check that they hadn’t mistyped her bank details, and they sent me a screenshot. It turned out that they had looked at the receipt from the hotel and, instead of using the interviewee’s bank details, had used what was written in the footer of the receipt document: the bank account of the hotel.

After facepalms all round, and a lot of awkward apologies from payroll, we finally transferred the payment to the interviewee’s account. She sent a very grateful email, ending with, ‘We may have lost at football, but at least I didn’t lose my money.”