COBOL Forever
There was a really great COBOL programmer back in the 1990’s who was making piles of money hand over fist. But she was terribly overworked, and getting really tired of slaving away on Y2K fixes.
From all her experience fixing mission critical code, she was becoming increasingly worried that civilization was going to collapse due to Y2K bugs.
After all that hard work, she never wanted to look at another line of COBOL ever again, she was just so sick and tired of it.
So she signed up with Alcor, and had herself cryonically frozen in 1999, leaving behind explicit instructions that she was to be revived after civilization had finally put itself back together again.
Time passed by, Y2K came and went, but to her, it was only the dreamless flickering of an instant.
Finally she woke up, in a clean futuristic hospital room, surrounded by inscrutable machines that go “ping,” and strangely dressed doctors with funny accents and weird hairdos.
She was so delighted to be alive that she exclaimed, “Thank you so much for bringing me back to life! I am so eternally grateful, and deeply in your debt! Is there anything I can possibly do to repay you? And by the way, what year is it?”
Then one of the doctors smiled at her cheerfully and said, “Yes, actually! It’s the year 9999, and the records indicate that you’re a COBOL programmer…”
