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.
I’m quite impressed she’s still able to travel at 101. My mum’s in her mid eighties and really struggles now.
She’s apparently not only traveled at 101, but traveled enough times since turning 100 that this has been a repeated problem for her!
Imagine being that old and still seeing the world!
Flying within the US to see family isn’t really the world.
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Then stop riding in her lap!
Is this like the millennial bug? They just forgot to add an extra two digits because they didn’t think humans would live that long?
You: “two digits…?”
Life as a head in a jar is a solemn and dignified life.
Three digit ages wasn’t in the requirements, so its out of scope. Maybe we’ll deal with it next phase. Surely that 101 year old lady can wait a few years for us to fix that bug right?
It turns out the 101 year old lady is more agile than the code
It’s a feature!
Airport techies: next few years? Son, this has to work the next few decades. Now give me a mo, I have to write this DOS batch script.
Is this like the millennial bug?
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.
Sorry, you predate or postdate the epoch. Please come back once you’ve de-Schrodingered
Feeds Nemoy fish flakes
2 digits to the birth year.
They dont put 101 years old in their database they write in 1923.
When they made the booking program they had such limited memory for their computer that they just stored 23 and removed the 19.
The assumption was that the companies would continually update and redo their systems to fix this flaw as computers got more powerful.
Turns out that late stage capitalism is unable to make the small investments to keep up with infrastructure improvements so here we are with planes that fall apart and booking systems running on floppy disks.
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We fixed this 124 years ago…
Worse is that this is basically just the Y2K problem…that they somehow never addressed.
They kludged it, probably only store 2 digits and if its lower than current year, assume 2000s, otherwise assume 1900s.
Ah, the “Windows 9” problem.
That’s what they just said. It should have been fixed 124 years ago.
Math is hard
At least choose an 8-bit digit for the ages of passengers! You’d have to live to be 256 to roll that over!
Might as well play it safe and make it a 16-bit integer on the off chance the world doesn’t end and we quadruple our life expectancy
We haven’t learned our lesson about Unix time overflow yet, have we? Better up it to 64 bit signed, just to be sure.
Make that bad boy unsigned, just to be safe!
Emperor Leto Atreides II deserves to Fly American™ just as much as the rest of us
I had to fight an annoying bug like this in our companys frontend code once. That specific country’s pretty-date settings insisted on returning only the last two digits of a year, and the UI framework’s date input field read it like that before parsing it back to a date.
Meanwhile in America: your baby isn’t covered by Medicaid because it isn’t born yet.
I see you are talking about babies. Please check 1 before proceeding further
[] Birth is forced by state
[] Birth is wanted.
You may have received a birth certificate, but we do not recognize your status of birthed.
This is outrageous. This is unfair.
“Ma’am, are you sure you’re old enough to travel by yourself?”
“Oh hohohoho, stop!”
Just like my table-waiting days. You want to make a woman’s day, just ask to see some ID when she orders alcohol because anyone who appears to be under 20 must be carded.
Honestly, that just pisses me off. It’s wasting my time and the servers time. It’s gone so overboard in the ‘card everyone’ policy.
I get asked if I carded someone at work: who, the guy with the neck tattoo and beard? No. “Well you should have”
Yeah. I get that it’s required - protects the bar and server from litigation.
She could be a baby.
I’ve definitely seen uglier babies.
Especially newborns.
Do airlines typically handle 1 year olds flying alone? That seems nuts.
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“news”
Oh lighten up.
We are taking about BBC, not some local news site. Hence I too find that odd.
The BBC is under no obligation to only report on deadly serious issues and it has never been that way.
Obviously…? I even up voted this, making it more likely for them to continue doing this.
