One of my friends sent me a story head had read on the The Daily WTF WWW site… A programmer wrote code that said ‘Start Database; Wait 1000000000 Seconds; Stop Database’. Unfortunately the wait translated into ‘wait until 1 billion seconds after now’, and then continue when this happens. Sounds fine? Well, most mainframe systems have an issue with the year 2038, and if the time goes over that, time goes backwards. 2038 is about 2^31 (or about 2 billion) seconds from 1-January 1970. So the database started up and immediately stopped.

Also on the site was a dialog box for Remedy’s Call Tracking System. Being rather helpful to those doing data entry, they allowed people to enter BC or AD on the year when entering when the problem needed to be fixed. And a Pizza place that will not let you enter an order if you are more than 1000 miles from the shop… I wonder if there is free delivery on Pizza’s delivered 900 miles away. There is also a photo of a train in london with the sign above a door ‘Coach number 12 of 11″. And then there is the billing system that lets you enter dates from 2005 to 2016… With the exception of 2008 which is set to be a rather lean year.

I guess you could say that I find The Daily WTF seroiously funny… You just cannot make this type of stuff up!