Updated Here's a bit of fun for those of you whiling away your time at work assembling an improbably long paper clip chain: imagine you're in London's Holborn and looking for ther nearest branch of Barclay's bank tentacle Woolwich. Pretty straight forward you might think, since this sort of information is readily available online.

Don't, however, ask Multimap or you could find yourself booking a flight on Virgin Galactic just to get to a cash machine:

Your odyssey begins here at the "Branch and cash machine locator" page.

Just select "Woolwich branch" and "London street" and type "Holborn" into the "Details" field and voila! - you just booked yourself on a 14,000+ mile wonga search mission.

Now, as our correspondent Martin Richards points out, the Earth is roughly 24-25,000 miles round (the equivalent of 3.3bn Wikipedians laid head-to toe), which means if the above is the shortest distance to this particular branch, then it must be in some sort of Earth orbit. Handy for the chaps aboard the ISS, but less than useful if you're in a hurry to get to the pub. ®

Update

This just in from Multimap:

Hi, Lester,

Thanks very much for spotting a bug in the service Multimap provides for Barclays. We've now fixed that, and the service is working properly.

Best regards, Audrey Mandela, Director

Our pleasure. The invoice is in the post.

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