COBOL joke from 1999:
A COBOL programmer, tired of all the extra work and chaos caused by the impending Y2K bug, decides to have himself cryogenically frozen for a year so he can skip all of it.
He gets himself frozen, and eventually is woken up when several scientists open his cryo-pod.
"Did I sleep through Y2K? Is it the year 2000?", he asks.
The scientists nervously look at each other. Finally, one of them says "Actually, it's the year 9999. We hear you know COBOL."
Our COBOL based system has MAXDATE = 31 Dec 9999
I tried to set a reference year to 9999 to temporarily disable a thing, but a mid-range system couldn't handle it, we had to use 2099