When I got gasoline today at the local Amoco station, the pump printed out a receipt with a date of 01/03/100. Just wondering if this date will cause accounting problems for (1) the pump itself; (2) the gas station owners (a SME owning numerous stations in the region) and (3) Amoco itself -- will the year "100" reconcile okay with whatever data Amoco compiles to send me my bill at the end of the month.

As you can tell from my post, I am one of the "unwashed masses" who doesn't understand this stuff technically. But I have a lot of common sense and I did prepare our large family well for y2k. I feel like Noah, only it didn't rain! (Yet.)

But no regrets. I remain convinced it's far from over. Just wondering about this possible glitch.

-- J Wheel (motherof5@wellprepared.noregrets), January 03, 2000

Answers

This and many others like it. Sounds to me like a lost sale, JW. Wondering how many of these your station owner can handle; Amoco can handle, etc. before they have to put up the "CASH ONLY" signs.

-- SH (squirrel@huntr.com), January 03, 2000.

Thanks for the alert, J. Wheel. This receipt will cause the downfall of Western Civilization. Hope your preps are in order!

-- Dan (fu@bar.com), January 03, 2000.

ANd will the IRS accept that as a receipt for purchases in 2000! :-0

-- Sheri (wncy2k@nccn.net), January 03, 2000.

At least you have the sense to recognize that you don't understand, this is the first step to getting the right answers.

This has a very simple explanation. Rather than as an absolute number, many computer systems store the year as the number of years since 1900- thus 100. So their system, internal to itself, still understands exactly when your purchase was made. The only mistake was in printing it out on your receipt, merely a display problem, not an indicator of a computer system problem.

Sorry folks...

-- N. Zax (smalltalkin@yahoo.com), January 04, 2000.