The Quick Call Curse

No matter how intuitive you think your UI is, users will find a way to break your assumptions. You spend weeks perfecting that dropdown menu, adding tooltips, and even including a literal "Click Here" button... then some genius comes along and manages to wedge a traffic barrier through their truck window instead. The eternal struggle of UX design isn't building interfaces—it's predicting the creative ways humans will misinterpret them. If you've ever watched a user test and quietly whispered "how is this even possible?" under your breath, you've lived this nightmare firsthand.

This is a masterclass in legacy systems biting back! The tweet explains how Social Security runs on COBOL (a programming language from the 1950s) where dates are stored using the ISO 8601 standard with an epoch starting 150 years ago (1875). So when a date is unknown, it defaults to zero, which COBOL interprets as 1875. The humor comes from Donald Trump Jr. misinterpreting Elon Musk's comment about this technical quirk as evidence of "150-year-old people collecting Social Security" – when it's actually just a database returning default epoch values! It's the perfect intersection of ancient programming languages, government systems that never get updated, and non-technical people drawing wild conclusions. Mainframe programmers are cackling while pouring another cup of coffee right now.

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Content Donald J. Trump realDonal... 11h V ..or is he too dumb (stupid to understand that. No wonder CNN's ratings (MSNBC's also) have gone down the tubes - and will stay there until they bring credibility back to the newsroom. Don't hold your breath! Q19K 1720.5K 108K 1 Luke Novak lukenov Replying to realDonaldTrump Java: Syntax error on token "") expected 1:30 22:45 73119 Twitter for iPhone

Junior developers turning their heads away from perfectly good documentation and help resources to stare longingly at the siren call of ChatGPT with half-baked prompts. The eternal struggle of tech leads everywhere - watching their team ignore centuries of accumulated wisdom in favor of asking an AI "how 2 center div plz?" and then implementing whatever hallucinated garbage it spits out. The documentation might as well be written in invisible ink at this point.

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