I've been crapping on the WT a lot lately, which sometimes seems a bit unfair to me, especially since I was never in, therefore I don't really have a dog in the fight. To provide a bit of balance, I'll reminisce about the rampant prophecy speculation going on in mainstream Christianity (I refuse to use the WT's pejorative term: "Christendom", especially since by definition, they're part of that classification π) in the 70s and 80s. To be fair, the churches themselves had been around long enough to realise that end times interpretations are like arseholes, everybody has one. The purveyors of prophetic wisdom were hangers on at the fringes. They would be invited to a circuit of certain (usually new and upcoming) churches regularly, where they would espouse their ideas and a collection would be taken to help further their work. Their stars would usually fade very quickly when they made specific date predictions and they inevitably didn't come to pass. This isn't so much about them as a memory I have of one particular piece of anecdotal evidence that a few of them attached themselves to.
In 1974 a joint venture of the major Australian banks introduced a credit card system called BankCard. How this relates to all of the above is because of one feature of it, the logo. It was a stylised lower case letter "b", in three colours. To the imaginative, this spelled "666". π Here's the Wikipedia article about BankCard, showing the logo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankcard
As a young lad being constantly told about the 666 symbol on the BankCard, I just could not see it! It didn't even look like a very good representation of a "b" to me, let alone a 6. I'd walk past a bank branch with the BankCard logo in the window and gaze at it, and walk off shaking my head, saying "I don't see it".
Take a look at the logo as depicted in the Wikipedia article. Was I wrong?