PROFITABLE BLUNDERS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVIII, Issue XVIII, 1 May 1897, Page 535

PROFITABLE BLUNDERS.

A certain doctor in London owes his first introduction to business to a very fortunate mistake. He was in a caji' in Paris, when one of the waiters coming to him, requested him to follow him, and conducted him to a group of young fellows who seemed to be settling some very important matter. He was hailed as ‘ the doctor,’ and was requested to immediately attend the party to a spot outside the town to render his services at an affair of honour. It came off, one of the parties receiving the ‘satisfaction of a gentleman ’ in the shape of a not very severe wound in the thigh. The young fellow was a man of rank, and, being taken with Dr. G., subsequently gave him letters of introduction to families in England, the outcome of which was that the doctor found himself with influential patrons It turned out that the waiter had mistaken him for a doctor living in the neighbourhood. A traveller in the East says:—Some years ago being at an outpost in China, and wishing to put some money in the bank as a fixed deposit, I sent 3,000 ounces of silver to a bank in Shanghai, asking them to buy gold and send it home to England for me. They made a mistake and invested it in a silver deposit. I wrote back at once pointing out their mistake, and asked that the terms of my former letter should be carried out. Silver has a very variable value, and during the time the letter had been going backwards and forwards each ounce had risen fourpence in value. This proved a very lucky mistake for me, for it put 3,000 fourpences in my pocket. A Norfolk gentleman tells the following story :—I had been assured that the shares in a certain South American silver mining company afforded an excellent investment, and one night I wrote from Norwich to the office of the company, enclosing a cheque for the purchase of one hundred shares at the then price of /3 a share. I heard nothing from them for two days. On the second day I read that the undertaking had failed. The very next day I received my letter back again through the Dead Letter Office. It had been misdirected— I had put Liverpool instead of London. A retired mariner says:—ln June, IBS9, I signed articles as fireman to go a three months’ voyage up the Mediterranean in the s.s. ‘Rome.’ The night before she sailed I was arrested in mistake, charged with committing a robbery at Aintree, and the magistrates remanded me for inquiries. A day later the man who had committed the robbery, and to whom I bore a strange likeness, was caught and I was at once set at liberty, the police acknowledging their mistake. In the meantime my ship had proceeded on her voyage. While homeward bound she foundered in a gale, all on board being lost A broker tells the following story :—I was acting as commission agent for a big coffee broker in South America, and we anticipated that the paper dollar would depreciate considerably in value owing to an impending revolution. In order to buy at the current rate of exchange, now was the very moment to act. I therefore immediately called a big order, one of the largest on record. Our code signal was the letter G and some figures, which letter I printed on the form. This was mistaken for the letter C, and curiously enough, one of the figures, a 5, was mistaken for the figure 3. I had written the message in a great hurry, fearing the Government might at any moment stop all communication. The result was the message was very different from what I intended, and the order now read for a class of produce which subsequently became quite a scarcity in the market. We made a very good thing of it—indeed, it put a few thousand pounds in our pockets.