In my temporary hiatus from computer-programming employment, I’ve taken a job as a supermarket check-out clerk. This morning, someone had a small order…somewhere between 2 and 3 dollars…and paid using a $100 bill! The subject line of this OP immediately went through my mind.
What are the biggest cases of overkill that you’ve ever seen happen?
Using liquid oxygen for a barbeque. Shame the original site was taken down 
Another link here.
Combat rules. Hand to hand, knife, pistol, rifle, mortar, artillery, air strike, ship support, use whatever you have at your disposal to make sure you kill the SOB!!
Using a computer programmer as a check-out clerk???
How about a jet powered beer cooler?
Using dynamite to dispose of a whale carcass.Exploding whale.
Working in Eagle, Alaska we didn’t have a car so we made the 30 mile run for beer in our helicopter.
Blasting any annoying horsefly with a 12ga shotgun.
It’s somewhat comforting to know that at least two of the items mentioned here (Whale carcass, LOx BBQ) were the subject of a Dave Barry column.
But they weren’t particularly successful at it, so this shouldn’t qualify. 
How about police using a helicopter to buy doughnuts?
if it’s good beer, I just don’t see how this qualifies as “overkill” in my world.
The latest Iraqi war…?
<Ducks and weaves>
Cost of beer: $150
Cost of ride to get beer: $350
Durnit, you’ve got a good point.
I would have bought more, and better, beer.
If the beer cost $150, then the cost of the ride was cheap.
The company I used to work for used hydrogen bombs to kill amoebas.
They had a couple of terminals used for billing. These were ancient terminals. To give you nerds an idea, the network was IEEE 802.4 - Token Bus. When was the last time you saw that? The monitors were capable of 16 glorious colors. The program we used was all text. 5 KB of text every 10 minutes is a very liberal estimate of the kind of traffic we were putting out. And what kind of connection did we have for this? A 14.4 modem? Hell, a 900 baud modem? No. We had a bi-directional satellite dish! Not only was it overkill, but for our uses, it was even worse than dialup due to the high latency of satellite communications.
About three months ago, right before I got laid off, they decided to replace the satellite with ISDN for better latency. There were two modern PCs in the office, but they didn’t even hook the ISDN up to those! Instead, they still had to go through a dialup ISP that charges by the hour! Wow.
Even more amusing is the fact that they used a TWENTY-FOUR PORT CISCO CATALYST SWITCH to hook up the TWO decrepit terminals. That’s a $1100 piece of hardware. Not to mention the CSU/DSU and the Cisco 2600 router… for terminals that send 5 KB of text every ten minutes.
They spent several thousand dollars when a $30 modem would have been much more than adequate.
Using a large (fake) bill to get a large amount of (real) change is a common dodge used by counterfiters. The guy passing the bill has only one fake, his buddy is carryibg the rest.
If he caught he will claim to be an innocent.