When is a $30,000 Plinko win on The Price is Right not really a win? When a little oversight ends up turning the game into a costly blunder for the show’s producers.

The show, which is now taping episodes for its upcoming 37th year, recently returned from a two-week hiatus, and one of the first games played was Plinko, easily the show’s most popular game. Contestants win disks through smart pricing, then walk up the steps of a giant pachinko machine, drop the disks through a network of pegs, and the chips land in slots marked in dollar amounts from $0 up to $10,000. A contestant can win up to five chips, so a $50,000 top prize is possible.

Something very exciting happened during this first taping: the contestant had already won her chips, and began playing. Her first chip went into the $10,000 slot. The second chip went into $10,000. The third chip followed suit and went into the same slot. Three top-prize drops in a row.

But backstage, someone quickly realized something had gone awry, because of a promo shoot during their off-time.

Yeah, yeah: blame the promo people. The story of my life.

It turns out, the Plinko board was used in a promo for an upcoming video game based on the show, and since time is money, they needed to make sure that when the cameras started rolling and the disks started dropping, they’d land in the big money slot. So they hid a wire inside the game so that the discs would always be guided into the big slot. That way, they wouldn’t have to film 100 disks being dropped to wind up with maybe ten or twenty actually hitting $10,000.

And, as you no doubt guessed, someone forgot to remove the wire when they were done.

Pesky promo people.

Then, as Carey tells it to ET, a staffer came running over and stopped the game in mid-play so that the board could be set right again.

I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall of that studio, because they had lots of ‘splainin’ to do! But to give them credit, they came up with a solution that didn’t penalize the contestant and made what you’ll see when this memorable episode airs be truly authentic.

Not bad for a day’s work as a contestant on a game show, right?

So they had to reshoot the pricing game and let the contestant drop all-legitimate chips. But because of the error, they still payed her the $30,000 she “won” to begin with.

Between getting the Vegas wheel to Los Angeles and shelling out thirty grand over a production error, things have suddenly got a lot more expensive. And somehow, I doubt this is what they had in mind when