Recently, Jörg S came across a rather interesting trouble ticket:

___ The Apocalypse Must Have Occured?! ___ Ticket ID : 76831 Created By : Cary L---------- Assigned To : Jörg S----- Priority : Low Legal wants to make sure that we have some special language in for the 2010 Q1 release, but when I try to add it to ComplianceTraq, I keep getting the same thing: ERROR: Please ensure the system clock is correct. And if it is... then God help us all, because the apocalypse must have occurred due to Compliance bugs, and we are still trying to fix them. Damn you, Compliance! I know times are tough these days, but does ComplianceTraq know something I don't? I didn't miss the apocalypse, right?!?!

After peeking outside to ensure that it wasn't raining fire and brimstone, Jörg felt pretty confident that the apocalypse hadn't, in fact, occurred. Though it did make him wonder if that's what legal meant by "serious consequences" if they failed to meet compliance requirements.

The message appeared to be coming from ComplianceTraq, one of the older internal web applications that was used for managing all sorts of compliance-related issues for their applications. It didn't take Jörg all too long to find the message, as only a single file contained the string "apocalypse".

Else If implementationDate > DateSerial( 2010, 01, 01) Then ' This can never happen, since implementationDate cannot ' be more than one year after system date... and because ' obviously a decade is way more than enough time to fix ' any lingering Compliance problems Response.Write _ "<B>ERROR</B>: Please ensure the system clock is correct. And " & _ "if it is... then God help us all, because the apocalypse must " & _ "have occurred due to Compliance bugs, and we are still trying " & _ "to fix them. Damn you, Compliance!" Response.End

Clearly, it was an easy fix, but Jörg just couldn't help but wonder why the original coder chose 2010-01-01 as the "sanity" date. The code appeared to be ancient, but surely any coder would have realized that compliance issues would always be around. After checking-in his changes, he took a peek at file's revision history.

# User Checked-in Comments ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1 jorgs 1997-01-10 new file 2 jorgs 1997-01-23 fixed bugs 3 jorgs 1998-02-09 added category fields 4 alany 1998-11-26 expanded title length --- snip --- 11 cyrusm 2000-03-13 replace "Y2K" w/ "Compliance" --- snip --- 33 jorgs 2009-02-09 fixed apocalypse

And then it dawned on him. Back when he was an intern, Jörg wrote a simple web application for tracking Y2K issues and, over the years, it must have transformed into ComplianceTraq. And obviously, he's long since learned that "impossible" code runs all too often.