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Nov 08Classic WTF: The Harbinger of the Epoch
by in Feature Articles on 2008-12-31The Harbinger of the Epoch was originally published on June 20th, 2006. Happy New Year, and have fun fixing those "Date Not Found" bugs created by your predecessors who never would have thought their software would see 2009.
January 19, 2038 is a date which will live in infamy. It is on that day that the 32-bit integer storing the number of seconds since the beginning of The Epoch will overflow, causing death and destruction unseen by the world since the Y2K Bug. As they did in 2000, software will spectacularly crash, hardware will explode, appliances will go haywire and attack their owners, and nuclear missiles will simultaneous launch and destroy the world. Casper Kvan was reminded of this impending doom when one of his systems suddenly went down.
When Nick Martin arrived at work at 8:30am, it seemed like he was in for a good day. Warm bagel and coffee in hand, he strolled into the IT office ready to fire up his email and maybe do a little recreational surfing before jumping into a day's worth of work. However, this was not meant to be as he was greeted by a support issue already in progress. And by "greeted", I mean "a dreary mess of a woman in a pinstripe suit was storming his way". It was Darlene, a manager from the university's financial department and conveniently, he was the only warm body in the office.
"Alright! 11:02 a.m...Another five bucks for me!"
Ray's life was out of control, but not in a bad way – it was just that everything was happening all at the same time. His wife was in her eighth month of pregnancy, so they were back and forth at Lamaze classes, babyproofing, and converting the spare bedroom into a nursery. Not to mention that Ray had received a better job offer and accepted, meaning that he had two weeks of transition at his old job and would have to hit the ground running as an admin at the new place.
Not too long ago, Eric J. signed up for Thawte’s 
Sebastian sat near a window, enjoying a hot dog in the warmth of the sun. The day was going wonderfully so far – he was the first to get to the newspaper that was left in the break room daily (and usually gutted by noon), he'd found a quarter face up near his desk, and his hot dog was particularly good since someone had left relish in the fridge with a note inviting anyone to help themselves. At first, he hardly noticed the hurried, heavy footsteps coming in behind him – "My f–cking VPN connection is broken again! Can't you stop fiddling with the god damn network‽"
Fresh out of school, Maxim was able to score himself a pretty sweet entry level position in a small private bank. Rather than being responsible for maintaining the company's static phone book on the corporate intranet or some other stereotypical entry level thing, he was placed in the understaffed Publications department to do some surprisingly heavy impacting IT work.