Arthur Fuller
fuller.artful at gmail.com
Wed Dec 7 23:22:04 CST 2011
I've got one like this, too. (Don't we all?) Way back when, I did an app for an insurance company's pension fund arm. The app worked just fine and everyone was happy, save one problem. (Preamble: pension funds come and go.) Everything was rock-solid save one particular report, about 90% of whose data was correct but the remainder was wonky. I fought this problem on and off for about 6 weeks, to no avail. Then one day in a meeting, someone mentioned that the company uses 360-day years. They just wrote off the other 5.26 days as if they didn't exist. Hence, on about 10& of the records, depending on calendar dates of the relevant funds, the reports were a few dollars out there and there. Once this was explained, I commented out all my clever date calculations (e.g. 365.26 is how to anticipate leap years) and pretended the world was flat, and automagically all the data conformed to the flat earth. Whew! At last, I was free to find a real job. A.