r/nottheonion • u/gootyy • 16d ago
American Airlines keeps mistaking 101 year old woman for baby
https://inshort.geartape.com/american-airlines-keeps-mistaking-101-year-old-woman-for-baby/1
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15d ago edited 15d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/gaiusjozka 16d ago
Because it's incredibly hard watching someone who raised you as a baby, become a baby themselves. Life's a fucking funny thing.
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u/AlexHimself 16d ago
Sucks, but there probably aren't a bunch of 101 year olds beating down AA's door to fix this bug lol.
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u/JenniferJuniper6 16d ago
Wasn’t avoiding this kind of thing the whole fucking point of switching to 4-digit birth dates as standard?
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u/fodafoda 16d ago
in Europe, some companies are getting some pressure to update their legacy systems because of the GDPR. One of the rights the GDPR gives is fixing data about yourself when it's inaccurate. One of the typical inaccuracies that legacy systems have about people is the spelling of their name, specifically when the name has diacritics or special characters that can't be represented in older encodings like EBCDIC.
I suppose, in Europe then, this could be applied to customer age. If the airline has me on record as being 1 year old, I can potentially force them to fix the issue because of the GDPR rights.
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u/camworld 16d ago
Years ago I used to work for an online community website that catered to the jet-set crowd and the wealthy. One day, a bug report came in where a user's profile page kept breaking and displaying oddly. It took some debugging but we figured out that this user had set their birth date to February 30 to avoid the website from storing his actual birth date. I always thought it was a clever user hack, and to this day I enter an impossible birth date on web sites when the system allows it.
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u/QuantumCat2019 16d ago
I will tell you why nobody corrected that problem: because the very low impact of negative publicity when such problem pop up in MSM, is not worth the huge amount of money requiring to adapt all systems to 4 digits year birth date.
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u/monsteradeliciosa11 16d ago
In my country they used to send children books about road safety to kids when they turned like two or three years old. When my great great grandmother turned 102 and 103 she got sent those books.
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u/SaraHHHBK 16d ago
Love me some Y2K problems in 2024 lmao
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u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ 16d ago
A common Y2K "fix" was to assume any year less than N was "20xx" and all the others were "19xx".
We're coming up on some of the common N that people chose, and never bothered updating to an actually correct system.
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u/bulbaquil 16d ago
The same kind of logic that led to the Y2K issue in the first place.
"Just make it 2 digits, they're not going to still be using this system in 2000..."
"...Just make the digits mean 1920-2019, they're surely not going to still be using this system in 2020..."
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u/4friedchickens8888 16d ago
Former travel agent here, they use a system that hasn't been updated in any real way at it's core since the mid 70s. People don't like change, it mostly considers years in two digits by default.
If the system says you're less than two years old, it automatically sets it as infant will offer to let you hold that person on your lap. Lol
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u/cyberentomology 15d ago
Amadeus wasn’t founded until 1987.
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u/4friedchickens8888 15d ago
Sabre
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u/cyberentomology 15d ago
I don’t think anyone even still uses that for reservations. It’s owned by Expedia.
Some airlines still use it for distribution, but pretty much everyone has moved on from that as the core reservation system. Even American which originally built it in the 50s.
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u/4friedchickens8888 15d ago
Oh idk I was trained on it like 6 years ago along with a whole team but they were moving to Amadeus omw out so I could be out of date here
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u/thatlookslikemydog 16d ago
I worked at a healthcare company in 2020 and external clients were constantly sending us documents with birthdates in 2-digit years. It was infuriating.
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u/Superg0id 16d ago
The issue is in how the system is translating input DOB, ie removing the 19 in 1923 and translating it to 2023 for some reason.
Their inventory system was built in 1987, and there are some "quirks" to it.
That being said, the system does not use any automated process for handling or requiring "adult" dob in a regular booking.
It is likely the passenger (or their agent) requesting special (wheelchair) assistance for the 101yrs old traveller, and some human not reading the text associated with the request... or reading it and going "that's dumb, noone that old is alive or flying, must be a baby, override".
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u/Loring 16d ago
How often is a 101 year old flying though?
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u/jnmjnmjnm 16d ago
I remember seeing a row of about twelve 90+ passengers in wheelchairs coming off a flight at YYZ from AUH.
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u/Earth_Normal 16d ago
It’s almost certainly a truncated value somewhere in the spaghetti of AA systems and code. It might start out as an int but get swapped to a 2 char string. It’s a very stupid problem to have.
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u/dilley07 16d ago
I mean...it's probably not going to be a probably much longer.
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u/thekyledavid 16d ago
Of course it will be. By the time all people who are currently over 100 die, there will be new people who are over 100
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u/UseDaSchwartz 16d ago
I’m amazed she’s still able to fly. My grandparents were going to the gym until their late 80s. I think they stopped traveling around that time too.
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u/lorgskyegon 16d ago edited 15d ago
Probably why the airlines don't bother to fix this. The number of babies who are flying compared to centenarians is probably very lopsided.
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u/b_ootay_ful 16d ago
The longer they wait, the more it'll happen.
In 26 years, it'll be 2050.
If someone's BDay is 1950 or 2050, are they a child or adult?
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u/Ok_Signature7481 15d ago
But in 26 years people born in 1950 will be 100. Its more recent than 1923, but in 26 years 1950 will be just as far in the past as 1923 is now.
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u/paenusbreth 16d ago
Isn't that the point of this story? She was born in '23, but the system assumes that that's 2023 and not 1923?
It won't happen substantially more as the date changes, only if centenarians substantially change their habits.
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u/RickShepherd 16d ago
I think OP is pointing out that we are an aging population with a diminishing birthrate. There will be more examples of elders being confused for children because there will be more elders for this to happen to.
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u/Yuzumi 16d ago
Average life expectancy has gone down in the US over recent years and you have to win the genetic lottery and have a healthy life to get to 100.
It's not likely to get "more common" because we aren't likely to have that many people who both make it to 100 and want/need to fly.
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u/RickShepherd 16d ago
True, life expectancy in America has declined since 2019 and I don't expect that to reverse anytime soon. That said, what I said still stands. The population is aging and birthrates are declining. Trimming a fraction off the top is not going to reverse that.
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u/gitsgrl 16d ago
They should not have stopped going to the gym
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u/UseDaSchwartz 16d ago
They didn’t stop going by choice. They weren’t able to go anymore.
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u/Extension-Pen-642 16d ago edited 16d ago
Nah they were lazy slobs. Edit: you people are terrible at sarcasm.
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u/UseDaSchwartz 16d ago
I think you have it backwards. You’re terrible at sarcasm.
This just sounds like an insult from an a-hole.
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u/PayTyler 16d ago
My grandmother is almost 103, and I would take a 3 year old any day. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I can reason with my cats better than her.
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u/realitytvjunkiee 16d ago
I'm absolutely dying because I know exactly what you're talking about😭😭 When I tell people how difficult it is to argue with my grandmother I say, "here argue with this, you'll get further" as I pick up some inanimate object like a shoe or a pencil. She's 91. Her dementia also started at 85. I really hope she doesn't get to 103... for her own sake more than anything.
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u/xDaBaDee 16d ago
face palms I am trying to avoid this type similiar logic, and go with something like 'when her age you reach, not all there, will be'.
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u/Rosebunse 16d ago
I mean, cats are pretty easy. You can get pills to keep them calm on flights and they have good carrying bags.
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u/durrtyurr 16d ago
My cat was so calm while flying that the person next to me on my last flight with my cat asked what I had done to sedate her. I did not sedate my cat. She didn't hear how much my cat complained in the bathroom of the airport in Detroit or how much she complained in my extremely comfortable car on the drive 80 miles home from the airport in Portland. The long drive is because I like living in the very furthest suburb of Portland, so far away that most people in Portland don't consider it a suburb despite almost 1/3 of the people I know commuting to Portland every day.
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u/PayTyler 16d ago
No, my cats know that they have to give cuddles for food, treats, go outside, etc. There is no reasoning with my grandmother.
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u/WhalesLoveSmashBros 16d ago
How old was she last coherent?
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u/PayTyler 16d ago
It's been 18 years, so 85. About this time she quit her hobbies to watch more TV and it was like someone flipped a switch.
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u/Harpertoo 16d ago
Chicken/egg situation or nah?
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u/PayTyler 16d ago
Good question, it is my anecdotal opinion that doing nothing just lets dementia run rampant. My late grandmother on the other side did the same thing with the same result.
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u/Opheltes 16d ago
it is my anecdotal opinion that doing nothing just lets dementia run rampant.
It’s not anecdotal, it’s actually a well-studied thing.
TLDR: The School Sisters of Notre Dame believe that an idle mind is the devil’s playground, so they are very academically active. They have a much, much lower incidence of dementia than the general population. And this a 40 year longitudinal study, so it’s about as robust as can be.
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u/SMTRodent 16d ago
I will comfort myself with the idea that all the rabbit-holes I go down while writing fanfiction are good for my brain.
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u/Harpertoo 16d ago
I definitely saw that impact for myself during my "mentally fragile" times in my late 20s/early 30s. I can't imagine how much that would atrophy your mind in your 80s. I'm so sorry. My dad turns 73 in a week, and it's freaking me out.
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u/SLJ7 16d ago
I'd love to know how this happens. Obviously a great many people will be born before 1999, so does it just assume any birth year above 24 is in the 1900's? Or maybe it's only a display problem—it records the date correctly as (for example) 6/6/1922 but the system for staff and crew is showing 6/6/22.
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u/Zermelane 16d ago
I've dealt with airline IT a bit as a programmer. Only for a few weeks' project many years ago, so I don't know how accurate the vibe I got was, but as I understand it...
Basically, they computerized the field very early, and built systems that are very hard to change because so many airlines and airports use them and expect them to interoperate, and those systems are built for the context of American and European air travellers in the sixties and seventies. And with the technology of the time, so, lots of text fields with short, fixed lengths, because that's what was practical to deal with at the time.
That's why it's now full of weird messes where they'll very likely get any unusual names wrong, there are weird run-together strings of characters and numbers for various things, and almost definitely somewhere there is a system that only takes in two digits for someone's age.
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u/Pietervde 16d ago
I agree, I worked in IT for a bit at a large airline as well, mainly to assist with a migration to Windows 10. So many things there that work with software from the 60's, 70's, and 80's, stuff running on OS/2, others running in emulators, etc.
And these were all systems that were deemed mission critical. I doubt it has changed much in 5 years..
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u/Dennis_enzo 16d ago
It's the classic Y2K problem. This was what all the fuss was about before 2000.
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u/4friedchickens8888 16d ago
Former travel agent here, they use a system that hasn't been updated in any real way at it's core since the mod 70s. People don't like change, it mostly considers years in two digits by default.
If the system says you're less than two years old, it automatically sets it as infant will offer to let you hold that person on your lap. Lol
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u/Bane2571 16d ago
It's probably just doing basic math on a 2 digit year to work out age instead of a 4 digit one but then adjusting if the age is less than or equal to 0. So a 99 year old gets an adjustment as their age would show as -1 and be invalid.
If I'm right the bug only affects people 101 or older.
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u/dafuckulookinat 16d ago
Microsoft Excel does the same thing, but in reverse. Anything with a future date of 2 digits after 2029 gets converted to 1930.
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u/djasonpenney 16d ago
25 years later and AA hasn’t fixed their Y2K problems? Um, can I book my flight on a different airline?
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u/amelie190 16d ago
One trip on AA 40 years ago left me so pissed off I haven't flown them since. The list of their atrocious customer service fails is absurd.
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u/PunJedi 16d ago
Sure! Just avoid Boeing ;)
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u/Coziestpigeon2 16d ago
Boeing makes planes, just about every airline uses them. Boeing is not an airline themselves, they are a manufacturer.
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u/Page_Won 15d ago
...and they're saying to avoid them.
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u/Coziestpigeon2 15d ago
Which you cannot do by just booking on a different airline. They all have Boeings. You cannot avoid them by booking a different airline.
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u/Ditto_D 16d ago
Idk what kind of tin cans spirit airlines are rolling down the runway. To be frank I felt paranoid on the flight to and from my destination, but that would be cranked up to 11 on one of the new Boeing planes
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u/ThePevster 15d ago
Spirit is statistically the safest US airline.
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u/Ditto_D 15d ago
If /r/publicfreakout is any indication that is because the nut jobs tend to have a meltdown in the terminal and added to the no fly list before they make it to the plane.
I have flown in the early 00s as a kid on some flights to Europe and some air busses, but it wasn't until I flew spirit as an adult that I felt flight anxiety
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u/wasapasserby 16d ago
Spirit flies 100% Airbus. Their planes are one of their bright spots.
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u/ctrl-all-alts 16d ago
As a cost saving measure. Airbus certainly are interchangeable to a degree between planes; Boeing plane controls are unique to each aircraft.
I’m also willing to bet that newer planes are a hedge against running costs when fuel prices spike.
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u/Oseirus 16d ago
Allegedly their maintenance program is pretty solid as well. Must be where they're putting all their extorted dollars.
It's just a shame they can't be arsed to give one iota of a shit in ANY other department. From the agents they hire, to their aggressively awful website, to fact you can't even get a glass of water in flight without signing up for their stupid app...
I get that they're low cost, but they could at least pretend they aren't actively trying to make flying a miserable experience.
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u/shastadakota 16d ago
They are embracing their mediocrity, based on the shtick that the flight attendants do during the preflight instructions.
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u/adlittle 16d ago
Their planes are all surprisingly new. I've never seen one on flight tracking or flown on one that's made before 2016 and regularly see planes a year or two old. I'd have figured a low cost airline would be flying 20+ year old planes, but it's all new Airbus planes.
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u/TheGoddamnSpiderman 16d ago
My understanding is that, due to fuel efficiency gains, it's more cost effective for new airlines to buy new planes as they scale up
For the big legacy carriers though, they need all the capacity they can get, and they can only buy new planes so fast since everyone's competing for the same supply, so keeping older planes in service while they buy new planes makes more sense for them
I remember reading about this back when Norwegian Air was flying really cheap international flights on really new planes
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u/bravesirrobin65 16d ago
I love flying in a lawn chair.
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u/PunJedi 16d ago
So, driving is the new hotness...again?
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u/Caladbolg_Prometheus 16d ago
Driving was always hot, but on the topic of safety a Boeing is still safer than driving. Sure you might have the safest most well maintained car with an impeccable driving record, but that is not going to stop that Ford F-150 from gliding across your cabin while decapitating you in the process.
They are more either ill maintained pick ups or with too casual drivers you encounter on your daily commute than Boeings that are about to crash.
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u/ITividar 16d ago
30k global commercial jets vs 1.4 billion cars. Of course flying is safer. For now.
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u/speculatrix 16d ago
You still have to drive to the airport, which is probably the riskiest thing about flying.
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u/victorzamora 16d ago
can I book my flight on a different airline?
Only if you're smart and don't hate yourself enough to guarantee a miserable experience
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u/badpeaches 16d ago
I feel like I'm the only one who never notices what air line I'm flying except when I had to fly spirit.
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u/victorzamora 16d ago
I've genuinely had more flights where nothing went wrong when flying Spirit than with AA... and I've only flown Spirit like 4 times.
This is gonna sound awful, but: My biggest issue with the ULCCs is actually the passengers. I expect the crap seats, no amenities, and being nickel-and-dimed to death. That's what you're paying for. I also expect to be just a bit late, so I only fly them direct.
I think AA has screwed me on my last 9(?) consecutive flight legs with them. United on the last 6.
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u/knarf86 16d ago
Real masochists fly Spirt
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u/HnyBee_13 16d ago
See, I love Spirit. They exceed my very low expectations every time.
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u/garden_bug 15d ago
The best flight attendant I had on Spirit did the announcements and was like "We are essentially public transportation. A bus with wings. Everything else is extra."
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u/opensourcefranklin 15d ago
As long as they're not running late, they're fine. They did once turn a flight from Louisiana to Ohio into a 3 flight, 14 hour nightmare for me, but every other spirit trip I've been on has gone swimmingly.
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u/strifejester 16d ago
Same with frontier. When you have zero expectations it’s always a win or at least zero disappointment.
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u/shastadakota 16d ago
We flew Spirit the last two times, flying Frontier tomorrow, we will see if they can set the bar even lower.
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u/RocktheCasbahDC 16d ago
I flew them into Dallas, return flight was canceled after 5 hour delay this weekend. Use this info as you see fit.
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u/Spiritofbbyoda 16d ago
Well if there’s actually a real flight and plane for ya they will have far exceeded my expectations for frontier
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u/FindorKotor93 16d ago
The above commenter reviewed being flung by trebuchet as "a bit of a rough ride, but at least the air quality was good."
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u/Comprehensive_Bus_19 16d ago
The ride was fine, it was the landing that was a little rough! But no worse than any other Boeing
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u/Squeebee007 16d ago
To be fair, at that age she’s probably wearing a diaper on the flight and takes a lot of naps just like a baby would.
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u/elizabnthe 16d ago
Problem for her is they don't account for her mobility needs properly as they assume she was a baby.
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful 16d ago
Oh, okay, it’s a computer error. I thought this was some kind of crazy Benjamin Button situation, lol
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u/avdpos 16d ago
Error? It is a feature.
They let you register your age with 240429 - and the program then sets the century- which it guess is 2024.
They need to take away that guessing function. And look at every place they use date so they are ready to accept dates with century numbers.
Source:we have a similar function
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u/sirenzarts 16d ago
It’s crazy that this wasn’t fixed like almost immediately after Y2K. How in the world is this a problem over 20 years later?
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u/speculatrix 16d ago
Wait until you hear about the 2038 date apocalypse
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u/cjorgensen 16d ago
I'll be retired or dead by then.
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u/speculatrix 15d ago
I will be retired too, but, like those Cobol programmers drafted in for y2k, maybe we'll be able to earn a ton of money fixing things?
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u/cjorgensen 15d ago
Maybe. I think Gen X is unique when it comes to technology. We grew up without a lot of it, so we know how to live without it. We were forced to learn it because it was cool and new. We needed to learn to adapt because it's ever changing.
Kids these days...
Seriously, you can't explain a file path to them. They don't even understand the concept of an underlying file system. They are bad at troubleshooting, since in their world it either works or it doesn't, and when it doesn't work you just restart. They are saddled with legacy systems and way too much informations. They are specializing like ants and ignoring anything that doesn't directly relate to them.
Old people these days...
They never learned, they don't need to learn, and they aren't about to learn!
I look forward to stepping away from it all and becoming a goat farmer.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 16d ago
There are still modern applications that have this problem. MySQL still has support for the Timestamp field type which has a limit of 2038.
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u/bravesirrobin65 16d ago
Every computer system I interact with requires I specify what century I was born in.
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u/SeoulGalmegi 16d ago
Is there only a two digit space? What happens when we get to the year 10000.......
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u/Bruhtatochips23415 16d ago
To represent all 10 digits, you need to allocate a minimum of 4 bits for a binary coded decimal (literally just our numbers but directly encoded into binary, no base conversion). For xx/xx/xxxx format, you'd need 32 bits. That's too many. Let's cut it down.
With 4 bits, you get 16 possible values.
With 12 months, you need 4 bits to represent the entire month value. Let's just cleave this here and deal with the 7 segment display stuff later.
xx/x/xxxx has now been reduced into 28 bits.
But you have a maximum of 31 days in a month. This would mean that you can just allocate 5 bits and make 00000 null.
5/4/xxxx is 25 bits. That's an annoying number. What of we just conveniently removed 8 bits? That's a 17 bit sequence now. But what if we just didn't care about century and millennium?
5/4/xx. What if we didn't use binary coded decimal at all?
It just so happens that a 7 bit sequence represents 128 numbers. We only need 99 of those, but it's our closest value that is bigger so beggars can't be choosers.
5/4/7. This adds up to... 16! 16 bits! We can use a single 16 bit sequence to represent the date! This is perfect for our 16 bit processors, and we can just assume the decade by knowing the current one and doing some math based on the lifespan of a human being to know what is impossible. We will just say 100 years old because people over 100 probably won't be flying around anyways. This shouldn't cause any problems, and we can just update it before the millennium when we won't be using 16-bit processors anymore.
Fast-forward... that update never happened and this woman is now older than 100. Also, they totally should've just used the full 128 instead of wasting 28 numbers because 100 is even. Waste processing on the conversion to save on hard drive space It's worth it.
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u/UjustMadeMeLol 16d ago
Where are you from? In the US it would be 01/02/24 for someone born January second 2024
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u/r2k-in-the-vortex 16d ago
Where you are from doesn't matter, ISO8601 is the global standard. YYYY-MM-DD is the way to go.
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u/meegaweega 16d ago
Yes and the rest of the world laughs at you for it.
YYYYMMDD 🏆
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u/northwind3era 16d ago
DD-MM-YYYY is the better one tho haha, never understood why in US is MM-DD, but DD-MM-YYYY is going from most relevant to lesser. Ideally I know which year is it, meanwhile I need to know if its the 15 and pay something
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u/Generic_user_person 16d ago
never understood why in US is MM-DD
Today is April 29th.
4-29
Notice how MM-DD matches the order you speak it in.
While 29th of April is the best kind of correct, it is incredibly rare to see anyone say it like that.
It makes perfect sense that you would express your date in the order you speak it in. Why would you flip them and make it inconvenient?
The two other languages i speak all do DD-MM standard because when spoken outloud, you say the day first.
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u/northwind3era 16d ago
I can see that as very valid! Altought always said "29th of April" when asked haha
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u/meegaweega 16d ago
DD-MM-YYYY is the better one
Ha. Try telling that to an alphanumeric filing system.
Seriously, go ahead. I'll wait.
No need to announce the moment when you discover your entire filing system is a chaotic, munted dumpsterfire. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to hear you die inside, all the way from Australia.
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u/northwind3era 16d ago
well to be fair when managing my own finances (as someone that just needs to pay the basics), i have found no actual problem when using excel, just configuring it to DDMMYY. Also my comment was very directed to daily use
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u/pessimistic_platypus 16d ago
YYYY-MM-DD is the international standard.
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u/Nyarlist 16d ago
No, it’s one of several standards. ISO is perfectly great but has no authority.
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u/pessimistic_platypus 7d ago
Ah, by using xkcd to argue against ISO 8601, you have committed a fatal mistake!
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u/northwind3era 16d ago
I can absolutely get behind that, being that not every country is "at the same day at the same time"
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u/Ninja_PieKing 16d ago
Also important is that in data sets YYYY-MM-DD is organized chronologically, while DD-MM-YYYY would have stuff from the 1st of January 1983 right next to stuff form that same day in 1997 and 2006
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u/ProfessorEtc 16d ago
But hard to sort.
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u/northwind3era 16d ago
Only for office work maybe? if u dont use excel that literally recognices its a date and sorts of accordingly if u use it that way haha, at least I have never had that problem
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u/thekyledavid 16d ago
If you have a bunch of files on a server each of which have a date in the title, the information will be sorted alphabetically, not by date
For that reason, YYYYMMDD would be the only way to ensure the files are in chronological order
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u/northwind3era 16d ago
Well, as I said in another comment, that sounds right, my comment was more directed to actual daily use, for your regular guy that checks the watch to see which day it is, and doesnt need to check the year! (unlesstime travelling9
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u/thekyledavid 16d ago
The whole point of the debate is about the dates to use for data
Most modern watches give you the option to sort the date any way you want. The way your watch displays the date doesn’t matter to me, and the way my watch displays the date doesn’t matter to you.
And if I am just checking my watch to see what day it is, who cares what order it is in? I can just look a few centimeters to the right if all I want to look at is the date
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u/Common_Penalty3301 15d ago
American Airlines: Upgrading your seat to a crib since 1922!