An IT glitch leaves the cabin crew expecting to welcome a baby on board rather than a centenarian.

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.

  • taanegl@lemmy.world
    38·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works
      28·
      2 months ago

      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?

    • MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net
      12·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • bitchkat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      I always put a date right around the turn of the century (1900’s not 2000’s) on websites that insist on having me provide a date.

    • Fisk400@feddit.nu
      3·
      2 months ago

      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.