Aw, hell no... I did what..?

I don't know what happened, I must have missed a decimal point or something...
-- Michael Bolton: Office Space


Yeah, it's kind of like that, only with more cussing, tears, and suicidal thoughts...

So, as you have read previously, I used to live in a C1 wormhole by myself, and I am currently shacked up with my corp in a cozy C5 pulsar. When I was moving out of my original wormhole, it took me about 3 days to get everything that I had out. This was mostly because I had to fly a lot of ships out individually. Because of this, when I was done, I had assets strung all across known space. Something else you may have gathered from the description of my personality type, I can be a bit of a perfectionist (Yay OCD). After a while it began really eating me that I had assets all over the place. I would have loved to just consolidate them all at one station (Jita 4-4). But to be honest, I just didn't want to spend two weeks flying ships all over the place just too soothe my OCD. If only there were a way to let someone else do all of the work for me...

Enter the world of courier contracts (The experienced players are letting out a collective groan)...

It works like this. You create a courier contract that says please move X item/s to Y station. I will pay you Z amount. While this sounds too good to be true, there is a catch. If the pilot is so inclined, he can just take all of your stuff. Because of this risk there is also a collateral system built in. This is how you discourage the theft of your items. The hauling pilot needs to front a certain amount of money just for the privilege of hauling your assets. If he takes even one, he is out the entire collateral. So you, as the customer, need to make sure that you are leveraging this collateral system properly to prevent any unintended theft.

As an example, one of the loads that I needed hauled to Jita contained four ships. All fully fitted and rigged. It was two Drakes, a Buzzard, and my (mostly) brand new Noctis. When adding the values, two drakes will run about 60M, a buzzard is under 20M, and the noctis, was like 65M. That's a little under 150M just in the ships not to mention the modules and rigs on them. Now since none of these were set up for pvp, there was no super faction or officer stuff on them. So, just to be safe, I estimated that the entirety of the order was probably about 400M. So I set my collateral at 400M so that if my stuff got stolen, I would get my money back.

I also proceeded to build contracts for the rest of my assets. After doing so I'm actually pretty pleased. Soon I would have all of my happy shinies all in the same place!

After a few minutes I jumped in and ran a search to see if any of my contracts had been picked up. In fact, one had! (Yay). But wait, it was accepted and then it was immediately failed. WTF? Oh well, looks like that dude is out a ton of ISK. I check my wallet and I don't notice any major change... odd. Oh, wait.. no, please no...

I bring the contract up to look and see how much this guy was going to have to pay me, and there is a problem. In the collateral section I have made a fairly gross error. Where I had meant to put the collateral at 400000000 (400 Million) I had in reality put the collateral at 400000 (400 Thousand)... %%$#@*! I am the biggest loser EVAR!

So basically, what happened was I just sold four fully fitted and rigged ships (including my damn Noctis) to some random guy for 400,000 ISK. I wanted to throw up. Out of all of the mistakes this one is probably the most intimate and painful of them all. You see, I have this problem; Big numbers and decimal points are the bane of my existence, always have been. I am a mathy type of guy, but once numbers get sufficiently big or small I just can't process them right. I don't know what it is, but it is my Achilles heel. Anyways...

*Lesson Learned: Double, Triple, Quadruple check those contracts! Contract scamming is a big business, don't feed the beast through you own stupidity, like I did. Pay attention!*