It never dawned on me before but I have been noticing my cash register receipts of late to check out the date that they always have. This would tell me I think whether their program is ready for 2000 or not. For example the liquor store receipt had the four digit year on it. The property tax bill from the town had four digits. The Dollar store two digits. Sunny's Surplus four digits. Haven't looked at the bank statements yet but I am going to. The county property tax bill only had two digits. So I am wondering if this might lean to compliant software on the four digit receipts and noncompliant on the two digit ones. But can't compliant programs still be on a noncompliant computer and malfunction in 2000? Any therrie

-- jhock (jhock34981@erols.com), November 06, 1999

Answers

Therrie = theory?

-- (spellme@a.spell), November 06, 1999.

You can't tell by the number of digits on a report (receipt). You can store 4 and print 2. You can also store 2 and print 4.

www.y2kkitchen.com

-- Sally Strackbein (sally@y2kkitchen.com), November 06, 1999.

I think that it is safe to say that if you see a 4-digit year displayed, chances are it's Y2K ready. However, if you see a 2-digit year, the jury is still out, since lots of software uses a "windowing" scheme where it will treat 11/6/99 as Nov 6, 1999 and 11/6/00 as Nov 6, 2000.

Of course, there are other tips and tricks. When I pay by credit card at a store that I frequent, the clerk always types in the expiration date as "9912", even though the real expiration date is in November 2000. Things that make you go Hmmmm....

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), November 06, 1999.

KOS: first of all, you never replied to my requests to jello-wrestle with ya! ;-)

Secondly,that clerk may have figured out what a few very observant operators of POS (point of sale) terminals have figured out: that on many of the systems, for many of the banks, the expiration date can be ANY date and it will work. The company I used to write technical documentation for had a mainframe computer system w/which they handled the accounts of around 34 banks for their bankcards. When the issue of the exp date first came up, in 1996, they decided after several months to simply disable the field. Ask the clerk why she puts in 1299 and ask her to put in a different expiration date and see if it works. You have a right, after all, to ask why she is putting in a different date than shown on the card.

-- preparing (preparing@home.com), November 06, 1999.