One of the dumbest excuses is: My goldfish ate the homework. Now, the exact wording isn’t known, but it must have sounded something like this when a Japanese man recently contacted video game maker Nintendo: “Could you please reverse my most recent credit card transaction? That was my fish.”
The Youtuber, who calls himself Mutekimaru, dared an experiment: he let his Siamese fighting fish play a Pokémon game on the Nintendo Switch. Since controllers are difficult to operate with fins, he developed control via webcam. Depending on where the fish swim in the aquarium, a specific command will be triggered. The animals had already played through several Pokémon games in this way, broadcast live on YouTube. And yes, there are people looking at this, although apparently fish play it about 100 times slower than humans.
The game recently crashed. However, the fish dared to continue swimming anyway, i.e. to press buttons. They landed on the Switch’s home menu, changed the username from Mutekimaru to Rowawawa, and then used the YouTuber’s saved credit card details to purchase 500 yen (about $3.50) worth of credit from the e-shop. All that was watch live on Youtube, but Mutekimaru didn’t realize it until seven hours later. According to media reports, he got the 3.50 euros back from Nintendo.
And the moral of the story: don’t give fishing your credit card? Not necessarily. The US youtuber Michael Reeves left last year buy $50,000 worth of stock in his goldfish. After three months, it outperformed the Nasdaq by about 14 percent.
There is also good news for the normal person without a financial shark: “My goldfish has hacked my computer” should be a completely legitimate excuse for all misconduct in the future.
Read previous episodes of the column here. You can find more good news here.