Olympic Chefs Inundated With 15,000 Eggs After a Major Google Translate Fail
Technology isn't perfect, and nothing better exemplifies our dependence on apps and devices better than a Google translate fail. A team of chefs from Norway recently experienced this modern quandary when trying to feed their athletes breakfast at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.
Chefs for the Olympic team ordered 1,500 eggs at a local Korean grocery store. Unable to place the order in the country's native tongue, the Norwegians consulted Google Translate to get the message across. But somewhere in the scramble of binary code and algorithmic magic employed by Google, an extra zero was added to the order. Like clockwork, a truckload of 15,000 eggs appeared, overwhelming the Scandinavian chefs.
Here's the chefs with their accidental bounty of eggs:
Chef Ståle Johansen described it as an endless cascade of cartons brought in by grocery store employees. “There was literally no end to the delivery. Absolutely unbelievable,” he told a Norwegian paper.
The chefs were able to return 13,500 eggs, giving them the more modest order they originally intended.
Johansen was quick to explain what egg dishes Norway's athletes will use to fuel their Olympic dreams:
"There will be omelets, boiled and fried eggs and smoked salmon with scrambled eggs. And we hope there will be a lot of sugar bread made for medal winners. We have made our provisions for that," Johansen said.
While a reasonable scapegoat, anyone who blames Google translate for a numerical error like this might just be trying to save face. After all, how easy is it misplace a decimal point or accidentally add a small, yet totally catastrophic zero to an order of that size?
Anyway, Norway's chefs might want to serve a grain of salt with all those omelets.