A 101-year-old woman keeps getting mistaken for a baby because of an error with an airline’s booking system.
The problem occurs because American Airlines’ systems apparently cannot compute that Patricia, who did not want to share her surname, was born in 1922, rather than 2022.
The BBC witnessed the latest mix-up, which she and the cabin crew were able to laugh off.
“It was funny that they thought I was only a little child and I’m an old lady!” she said.
But the centenarian says she would like the glitch to be fixed as it has caused her some problems in the past.
Certainly sounds like it. The whole issue was that if year was a two-digit value, it was always interpreted as 19xx. Some systems were updated to require 4-digit years, but many (especially older, niche systems, which plenty of airlines still operate on) just kicked the can down the road. Some made a new static cutoff date for determining 19/20 that someone will have to fix in X years, or a range based on the current date, which sounds like what happened here. Birthdate stored as 25? That means 1925. Birthdate stored as 23? That means 2023.
Any coders out there want to deal with decades-old tech debt for the remainder of your career? Pick up COBOL and live the dream.
I’ve taken an intro to programming class with Fortran 77, how do I leverage that into a job?
One of my former classmates actually likes COBOL and tried to get a job in it since it was his main programming language but couldn’t and ended up doing help desk. I guess it probably matters where you live too even for COBOL jobs.
I think my phrasing was a bit poor. To my knowledge, there aren’t many COBOL jobs out there. I don’t believe there’s much of anyone using it for active development anymore. But there’s plenty of places running on legacy back ends that have nobody to turn to when it breaks. The folks who wrote it retired years ago, and there’s fewer and fewer people left with the skills to maintain it (some of whom may or may not have been in the latest round of layoffs for Company X). The value, IMO, is being The Guy when something goes pear-shaped, and someone says, “Hey, I know a guy…” Then you get to go in as a consultant/contractor and look at un-commented spaghetti code last modified in 1973 and go to town. Do a good job and they’ll call you first next time. And if it breaks enough, then they might offer a position.
Meanwhile, the one who wrote it is off somewhere sipping Metamucil, possibly musing about how back in '96 they submitted a report that said the company really should migrate off of the platform, but nooooooo that was too expensive/complex/inconvenient.