Great story BP - thanks for posting.
It reminds me of one from one of my colleagues back in the late 70s or early 80s. He was flying a biz jet to the N Pole with a load of some half a dozen nav engineers and their latest nav equipment in the back to test. Approaching the pole, they were counting the number of (latitude) minutes from 89°N. In rough unison each engineer called out 56, 57, 58, as the latitudes clocked over, then 59 , 00 then 59 again, except one voice that piped up 61...