Wells Fargo says CD deposit notice saying 1900 is NOT Y2K related. Yeah, right.

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Wells Fargo Mail Date: 1900

(Education use only)

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Wells Fargo recently mailed 13,000 certificate-of-deposit renewal-notices with the year 1900 printed on them, and traces the error to a mistake by a supplier, not a millennium computer bug. Bank officials said the notices told customers in 10 states that their certificates would expire in January 1900 instead of January 2000. A spokeswoman said a statement-printing vendor forgot to change the date on its printing mac

-- smfdoc (smfdoc@aol.com), December 21, 1999

Answers

ROTFL! If you believe that you really are DGI.

-- Sheri (wncy2k@nccn.net), December 21, 1999.

Has to be!!! Went to the store no toilet paper!!!Probably due to paper shortage.

-- kl (notp@thestore.com), December 21, 1999.

Actually, this is perfectly reasonable. Anyone who's used an outside printer should be able to verify. The printer often hard-codes headers, field fragments, etc, to reduce the total file size that has to be shipped. This is done in the text-handling software, not on the image. That is, you don't run it through a printer that prints the "19" and then through another one that prints the 2-digit year from the data file. Instead, the print software adds the hard-coded century to the date.

We've seen a couple of these reported, and it's EXACTLY what you'd get if the printer forgot to change the hard-code field. Data is good, calculated interest or whatever will be fine, but the date is simply shown wrong.

You know me, I'm no polly. 25+ years on big iron, heavy duty batch world. This is just a printer error and is NOT a "y2k problem" meaning a 99/00 computation error. It certainly is a date-related oversight, and it's happening because the century is changing, so in a very limited sense you could call it "y2k", but I don't.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), December 21, 1999.


I am particularly impressed by the irony of Wells Fargo's announcement last week that they and their critical suppliers are completely ready for Y2K...

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), December 21, 1999.

--bw, I respect your expertise. My concern would then be that a judge says I don't have documentation to claim any return on my cd.

But heck, a mistake by a supplier... perhaps it's not a y2k issue because the vendor mailed them a survey saying they don't have any y2k probs. Not enough info to be certain.

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), December 21, 1999.



The real answer: Wells Fargo has been attacked by Y2K terrorists, the same people that will shut down the power grids, communications and financial industries in about ten days.

-- Slobby Don (slobbydon@hotmail.com), December 21, 1999.

Too many more visible "glitches" like this one and I wouldn't want to be a bank teller next week. Y2K or not, this is NOT the type of publicity any bank wants or needs right now...

R.

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), December 21, 1999.


BTW - how that all got started. The tapes sent to the printer are often just spool tapes from the mainframe. So that 2-digit year in the tape would have printed as 2 digits if they went to the old line printer. The printer company's sales pitch would include something like "we can add the century for virtually nothing, blah blah, reformat from [mm/dd/yy] to [monthName day, yyyy], make it look snazzy." and management gets to toss the line printer and maintenance.

If they were setting that up as a new app, the programmer would just write the date as he/she wanted it to print. Dataspace is cheap now. The date problem in this thread cropped up because [big surprise here] management took the cheap route to look snazzy.

So even if I don't call this a Y2k problem, it sure comes from the mindset that gave us Y2k. It's like finding an 80-character record - I got a pretty good idea how long it's been since THAT system was re-engineered!

-- bw (home@puget.sound), December 21, 1999.


Just curious BW, why would forgeting to change the "hard-coded" century from 19 to 20 not qualify as a Y2K problem? Too crass for you. In fact if a clerk had handwritten the wrong century 3000 times why wouldn't that count as a Y2K problem. I wonder if a CD with such a date on it is legally speaking anything other than funny money? Hope so. Of course if you have a CD legally dated from 1900 what kind of interest should it have accrued, I mean the face value from 1900 is there plain as day. A rose by any other name.

-- PD (PaulDMaher@att.worldnet.com), December 21, 1999.

Actually, looking at the article, uh, I guess that helps, it is only the renewal notice, in error. It is still valid that the mechanism of this error is not relevant to whether in fact it is or is not a Y2K error. I mean step back for a minute, they put in the the wrong century on their notice, that I would say by definition is a Year 2000 error.

-- PD (PaulDMaher@att.worldnet.com), December 21, 1999.


Paul,

I see your point. In my opinion, it is a Y2k error. But, in my opinion, it tends to fall in that "soft" category.

In my remediation projects, we always followed a certain priority: (1) Make sure the program internals are doing what they're supposed to -- that everything is calculating correctly, and all that; (2) Make sure that anything printed that the public sees is non-ambiguous; (3) If there's still time, fix the internal reporting print format.

Number (2) is especially important if you're a financial institution of any kind. Perception is reality. And this tells me that Wells Fargo was sloppy -- and that makes me wonder if their internal fixes were just as sloppy.

-- I'm Here, I'm There (I'm Everywhere@so.beware), December 21, 1999.


Excuse me for saying so but I think that something is being overlooked here. Its not only If it is in fact a processing glitch but rather, if things are OK as is being said and implied, that it was missed. Easy to do you say because of its trivial nature. But what else presumed a trivial part or parts is maybe not so trivial. CP

-- CP (Spoonman@prodigy.net), December 21, 1999.

My dad has bought two new pick-up trucks within the past 5 years, both financed through Wells Fargo. He tried last week to trade in for this years model. They told him he did not meet credit critera for them to finance for him.

-- grannyclampett (don'thave@clue.com), December 22, 1999.

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