Comment by jcl

Thedailywtf stories are generally some mix of fiction and fact. They take a presumably first-hand account from an insider and change a bunch of details to anonymize it and enhance it for dramatic effect.

I'd guess, for this particular story, that at least the misparsing of XML for a futures contract actually happened, and maybe that some producer consequently had to ask about the feasibility of delivering to a corporate office that happened to be in former docklands. It's entirely possible that the commodity involved was not coal, and it's extremely unlikely that a guy showed up one day at the front desk with a clipboard and barges outside.

In response to skepticism in the comments, the article's author gives an example of a futures contract on eggs where delivery was accidentally taken: https://web.archive.org/web/20090925022603/http://www.minyan...