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.

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