Commonwealth Bank EFTPOS giving dates in 2099 (Sydney, Australia)

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On the 3/1/00 I went to buy some furniture at Doors Plus at Punchbowl sydney australia. The date on the Commonwealth Bank EFTPOS receipt was "03/01/99". I am a computer programmer and have fixed many of these problems in the last couple of days where the software thought it was the year 2099.

I have since made other transactions in Sydney (Inner City and the year of 99 is comming up on the receipts.

I went to the commonwealth bank in North Sydney and reported the error. They were in denial, but admitted that problems have been reported.

May worry is that if bank trnsactions are being stored with a date stamp of the year 3/01/2099 then wont this affect accounting and interest calculations. But if this date is actually in 1999 how will they distinguish what transactions belong to 1999 and the transactions done this week?

-- Harry Phelps (hphelps@acnielsen.com.au), January 04, 2000

Answers

Response to Commonwealth Bank EFTPOS giving dates in 2099

Hi

Thanks for this excellent post. Please keep us updated, this would be one that the media might "get". Can I ask you, have you kept any of your receipts from last January? Most of us expect that the accounting nightmares will continue into 2001 and beyond.

This post also brings a problem we expect with multiple types of dating and windowing conventions, starting next year: what exactly does 02/03/01 mean? In the US, that's February 3, 2001. In most other countries, that's March 2, 2001. OTOH, in computerspeak, that's often March 1, 2002!

-- Bud Hamilton (budham@hotmail.com), January 04, 2000.


Response to Commonwealth Bank EFTPOS giving dates in 2099

This "problem" was also reported on the Canberra news yesterday. I had the opportunity to talk to a Commonwealth Bank representative today (not a branch person). He advised me that the issue was known prior to 1 Jan 2000 and all merchants had received written advice to shut down their EFTPOS units prior to starting trade in 2000. Then restart them. All dates would then read year 2000.

The problem rests with merchants who did not follow proper instructions and one could say did not prepare properly for Year 2000.

Purchasers should take up the issue with the merchant - especially if warranties are at risk.

-- Stephen R. Taylor (srt@interact.net.au), January 05, 2000.


Hi Harry!

My husband Eddie went today to dump some rubbish after doing some spring cleaning and after reading your email, he decided to check the reciept he got from the waste disposal centre in Glenfield in south western sydney as we paid by eftpos. It was Commonwealth Bank and lo and behold the date read 6/01/99. I rang them after reading these other responses and the lady in the office was horrified and said she was never informed by Commonwealth Bank of the problem. She is stopping the use of the eftpos machine until she gets answers.

I'll be checking my statement online to see if it has been posted to our account which I'd guess it hasn't.

-- Carina Canales (ecc@one.net.au), January 05, 2000.


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