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."
I had a job that used COBOL and programmed in it. Its not terrible. It even works with sql.
The issue is the decades of code with little to o documentation, the fixes for issues like y2k that wirked at the time but now have problems, and greedy companies that want you to pay per processor. All the while you yourself are one of three people in the city that are looking to slowly pull everything out of COBOL, making it just a bit harder to get a job next time.
Interesting. My experiences with FORTRAN made me expect the worst.