Actually, the £ symbol (ASCII 0163) has been a part of the ASCII character set used in the US at least since 1987 (along with a few other currency symbols). This was over a decade before the Euro was even in use. Even earlier character sets used in the US contained £ characters, although it wasn't part of the earliest USASCII (c. 1970, which only contained characters present on US typewriters and teletype printers). Perhaps you'll recall that, before Unicode, each region (and regional keyboard type) had its own ASCII/ANSII character set/code page that contained the most commonly used national characters for each region. Extensions added more characters as time progressed, until today's unified character set gradually began to be implemented in the mid 1990s. I dealt with those evolving standards throughout that time in my publishing job.
As to the VP from Florida - yeah, I wouldn't dispute that. Corporate types certainly do tend to "rise to the level of their incompetence"