Come a guy’s 18th birthday in the US, he’s afforded new privileges. Aside from being able to legally buy cigarettes, lottery tickets and porn , he also has a couple of shiny civic duties to follow: signing up for the Selective Service System and voting on a regular basis. In terms of the former, draft dodging is a pretty serious offense, as the families of very old (and most likely very deceased) men in Pennsylvania were recently reminded. According to Boston , a database operator’s error caused some 14, 250 notices to go out to men born between 1893 and 1897, stating that their failure to fill out draft cards could result in fines and imprisonment. How’d that happen? Well, if you’re familiar with the Y2K Bug , the story makes a lot more sense. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s cataloging software apparently uses a two-digit birth-year field, and, as a result, the operator unknowingly selected gents hailing from a hundred years prior the actual target range of 1993 to 1997. Keystone State employees didn’t realize the issue until they were inundated by calls from understandably confused family members asking what the deal was. To its credit, the SSS issued an apology and noted that those files would be deactivated from the database and will send a personal letter of apology to President Lincoln posthaste. [Image credit: Getty] Filed under: Software Comments Source: Boston
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Computer glitch resurrects draft cards for 14,000 long-dead Pennsylvania men
