A 101-year-old woman keeps getting mistaken for a baby because of an error with an airline’s booking system.
The problem occurs because American Airlines’ systems apparently cannot compute that Patricia, who did not want to share her surname, was born in 1922, rather than 2022.
The BBC witnessed the latest mix-up, which she and the cabin crew were able to laugh off.
“It was funny that they thought I was only a little child and I’m an old lady!” she said.
But the centenarian says she would like the glitch to be fixed as it has caused her some problems in the past.
“Ma’am, are you a baby?”
Is there a discount?
“Yes, children under 5 fly free.”
Then I am a baby.
However babys cannot fly alone so she needs an adult who pays a normal ticket to accommodate her.
Thanks for “Ackshually”-ing an obvious joke. Please see the Yes, and… rule of thumb.
They made an, in hindsight, extremely creepy movie on this subject back in the 40s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_and_the_Minor
(I love Billy Wilder, but ick.)
I’m quite impressed she’s still able to travel at 101. My mum’s in her mid eighties and really struggles now.
She’s apparently not only traveled at 101, but traveled enough times since turning 100 that this has been a repeated problem for her!
Imagine being that old and still seeing the world!
Flying within the US to see family isn’t really the world.
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Then stop riding in her lap!
Is this like the millennial bug? They just forgot to add an extra two digits because they didn’t think humans would live that long?
You: “two digits…?”
Life as a head in a jar is a solemn and dignified life.
Three digit ages wasn’t in the requirements, so its out of scope. Maybe we’ll deal with it next phase. Surely that 101 year old lady can wait a few years for us to fix that bug right?
It turns out the 101 year old lady is more agile than the code
It’s a feature!
Airport techies: next few years? Son, this has to work the next few decades. Now give me a mo, I have to write this DOS batch script.
Sorry, you predate or postdate the epoch. Please come back once you’ve de-Schrodingered
I always put a date right around the turn of the century (1900’s not 2000’s) on websites that insist on having me provide a date.
Feb 29 1904 - 120 years ago and a leap day.
Feeds Nemoy fish flakes
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We fixed this 124 years ago…
Worse is that this is basically just the Y2K problem…that they somehow never addressed.
They kludged it, probably only store 2 digits and if its lower than current year, assume 2000s, otherwise assume 1900s.
Ah, the “Windows 9” problem.
That’s what they just said. It should have been fixed 124 years ago.
Math is hard
At least choose an 8-bit digit for the ages of passengers! You’d have to live to be 256 to roll that over!
Might as well play it safe and make it a 16-bit integer on the off chance the world doesn’t end and we quadruple our life expectancy
We haven’t learned our lesson about Unix time overflow yet, have we? Better up it to 64 bit signed, just to be sure.
BigNumber is the solution.
I had to fight an annoying bug like this in our companys frontend code once. That specific country’s pretty-date settings insisted on returning only the last two digits of a year, and the UI framework’s date input field read it like that before parsing it back to a date.
“Ma’am, are you sure you’re old enough to travel by yourself?”
“Oh hohohoho, stop!”
Just like my table-waiting days. You want to make a woman’s day, just ask to see some ID when she orders alcohol because anyone who appears to be under 20 must be carded.
Honestly, that just pisses me off. It’s wasting my time and the servers time. It’s gone so overboard in the ‘card everyone’ policy.
I get asked if I carded someone at work: who, the guy with the neck tattoo and beard? No. “Well you should have”
Yeah. I get that it’s required - protects the bar and server from litigation.
Meanwhile in America: your baby isn’t covered by Medicaid because it isn’t born yet.
I see you are talking about babies. Please check 1 before proceeding further
[] Birth is forced by state
[] Birth is wanted.
You may have received a birth certificate, but we do not recognize your status of birthed.
This is outrageous. This is unfair.
She could be a baby.
I’ve definitely seen uglier babies.
Especially newborns.
Do airlines typically handle 1 year olds flying alone? That seems nuts.
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Is it really that hard to lie about your age
She’s 101. Fuck no would I lie about my age if I was 101. I’d brag about it.
“All those bullies back in high school? Fuck you, I outlived every last one of you assholes!”
On a plane? The details you enter have to match your ID.
TSA will send you back to the ticket gate if your ID doesn’t match booking details.
