Jeff Ferrera of Waukegan, Illinois, was reconciling his checkbook and called First National Bank of Chicago to get his current balance.

"Your primary checking account currently has a balance of $924,844,204.32," droned the electronic voice. Ferrera was one of 826 customers who were almost billionaires for a day because of the biggest error in the history of U.S. banking. The goof amounted to almost $764 billion, more than six times the total assets of First Chicago NBD Corporation. "I had a lot of people saying in jest to transfer it to the Cayman Islands and run for it," Ferrera said. But, like most of the others, he simply reported the error to bank officials, who could say only that it was a "computer programming error."

It pays to remember that all earthly wealth is just as temporal.