At the end of the 1990s, when the so-called error of 2000, which supposedly promised to multiply by zero the many years of effort of American programmers, dimmed on the horizon, many of our brothers came to the United States to participate in solving the evil problem.

There was one programmer in our team, let’s call him Lecha, who said what’s called, rarely, but deliciously. He worked for an insurance company in Mainframe. Like any mainframe maker, he has periodically had to work on call, this is when you are appointed as a security guard on the system and the operator from the computing center can call you home at night if something is not working. It is clear that no one likes to be awake in the middle of the night to deal with someone else’s mistake and make the program work out, but here you don’t go anywhere – that’s life.

So our Leha started receiving the same type of calls every time he was on night duty. He began to understand what it was about and discovered an interesting pattern for himself. The program, which was constantly rolling, handled the insurance policies previously introduced into the system.
Individual insurance policies have flown to the wave. Most families, too, but with a few exceptions.

During the processing of policies, the gender of insured persons was checked under certain conditions. In the distant 1970s, when the system was written, it was assumed that the spouses, naturally, should be of different sexes. Otherwise, the program believed that there was a data input error and completed the work in emergency mode. Until the end of the 90s, everything worked like this, but the times, unfortunately, change.

Leha for a long time could not understand what was the reason for such frequent failures and to the night calls of the operator stupidly responded that it was necessary to continue the execution of the eadachi.

When he understood what it was about, a lonely, but penetrating Russian phrase emerged from him: "They borrowed the pd#$@sy!"