Quote:
A software weenie spends his life making a living writing COBOL programs. Eventually he retires in the early 1990's, to a life of golf and relaxation.
Well, as the year 2000 approaches, anxiety skyrockets over so-called "Y2K" problems with date and time keeping routines. IT people start leaving phone messages to the effect that, "...we hear you know COBOL, and staring at the end of the millennium, we're concerned about our code..." The guy is pinged mercilessly until he agrees to return to work as a consultant. For the next few years, he travels around the country fixing COBOL Y2K problems.
In late 1999, he starts to feel some anxiety of his own. What if the "fixes" he implemented don't work? He decides the best thing to do is to have himself cryogenically preserved for a year, and then thawed out. By that time, he figures, all of the hooplah will be over, and even if he did screw something up, someone else will surely have taken care of it. So, off to cryogenic suspension he goes.
Needless to say, something goes wrong. (Perhaps the cryo-timer routines were written in pre-Y2K COBOL!) He wakes up in a strange room filled with strange people. "He's alive! We did it!" the strangers congratulate themselves. One guy finally approaches the man and says, "Welcome to the year 2999!"
The programmer is despondent. He is alone and everyone he has ever known or loved is dead. But the people from the future are quick to point out how great their life really is. "Nobody is ever sick, nobody ever goes hungry. We have robot companions, starships, teleporters, and holodecks.
"That's great," says the programmer. "But why did you bother to resurrect me?"
"Well, you see," answers one of the men from the future," the new millennium starts in a few months and your records show that you know COBOL..."
The above was taken from Jack Ganssle's TEM newsletter.
