this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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COBOL joke from 1999:

A COBOL programmer, tired of all the extra work and chaos caused by the impending Y2K bug, decides to have himself cryogenically frozen for a year so he can skip all of it.

He gets himself frozen, and eventually is woken up when several scientists open his cryo-pod.

"Did I sleep through Y2K? Is it the year 2000?", he asks.

The scientists nervously look at each other. Finally, one of them says "Actually, it's the year 9999. We hear you know COBOL."

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[–] MNByChoice@midwest.social 2 points 7 hours ago

Yeah, at they approach 9999 surely they will start using larger variables to store the year, and all of the 2000's code will have moved out of production (2000's and not 1970's because we may have fixed the 1970's code by now.)