You found the ISO8601 Epoch error!

Posted byB McGrawPosted inArticles

You dig into how the dates are being populated to discover that the COBOL section in question uses dates starting in 1875 according to the ISO 8601 standard. It’s an old one but it is a standard used when this system was set up. So likely, these 150-year-olds are zero’d out for one reason or another and show up as 150 years old. That also sounds suspicious. But the year count at least makes sense.

Before you get a chance to look further, Elon pops into your office.

“Hey, saw on the key logger that you found something interesting. That’s going to be a really fun time telling everyone that this old antiquated system has been paying out money to 150-year-olds. Thank goodness we’re here to save everyone from this obvious fraud.”

How do you explain the error to Elon?

It’s not fraud, it’s a typo and an old Epoch from 1875, we should find out their real birthdays and verify before cutting them off

Maybe look into it? I don’t think it’s fraud, but maybe it is?

Whatever it is, I think it’s fraud too, cut them off.

Published by B McGraw

B McGraw has lived a long and successful professional life as a software developer and researcher. After completing his BS in spaghetti coding at the department of the dark arts at Cranberry Lemon in 2005 he wasted no time in getting a masters in debugging by print statement in 2008 and obtaining his PhD with research in screwing up repos on Github in 2014. That's when he could finally get paid. In 2018 B McGraw finally made the big step of defaulting on his student loans and began advancing his career by adding his name on other people's research papers after finding one grammatical mistake in the Peer Review process.

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