the problem with computers

The fundamental problem facing the Computer Person today is not, contrary to public belief, learning how to operate the brand-new Artificial Intelli-Brain 5000; nor is it learning the thousands of languages Computer People use to talk to their computers; nor even the venerable task of comprehending the massive collection of software, hardware, magical runes, and plain dumb luck that keeps the World Wide Web afloat. Rather, the Computer in all of its years of development still faces the core issue that it is a counting machine, designed and used primarily by ape-descended life forms who were - and still are - incredibly, extraordinarily terrible at counting.

This leads to many humorous counting-based problems, some of which have made it into the accords of history on Earth. Notably, “Y2K”, which was caused by the human race making a slight counting error in believing that the last year (a unit of Earth measurement almost, but not quite equal to one revolution of the Earth around its star) and thus the End of Time would be 1999, when in fact the End of Time is an award-winning catering venture and 1999 is just a normal year that would be followed by at least several others. Another was the “October Problem”, an innocuously-named phenomenon where humans would number their months (a unit of measurement almost, but not quite one twelfth of a year) from 1 to 12 but order those numbers in alphabetical order like their corresponding names. This led to the computers, dutifully following instructions, ordering the months “1”, “10”, “11”, “12”, “2”, “3”,… and so on, making October (the 10th month) come before September (the 9th month).

The problem was so insidious, and no solutions were forthcoming, so on the Earth year 2047 Coordinated Universal Time (which, bafflingly, applies only to planet Earth) was adjusted so that the order of months matched this previously-incorrect sorting. Citizens mourned the fact that the northern half of the planet now experiences many cold-weather holidays in warm weather, but humankind accepted this as a necessary sacrifice, and they rejoiced at the prospect that they were finally free of their old computer problems and could go on to discover new, exciting, and exotic problems the likes of which were beyond their wildest dreams.