The most outrageous moments of my career

[ichabod801]

I used to write the same report every year, on pediatric poisonings. I used data from NCHS (National Center for Health Statistics). One year they changed their format, and I didn't notice. I was using SAS, and the default when reading data and line has too few elements is to the read the rest of the elements from the next line. So I was reading every other line of data, and my numbers were half what they should have been. I didn't notice this until the report had been cleared by a dozen people and posted on our web page.