My initial reaction to websites wanting to know my age was to avoid getting involved. But then I remembered the good old Millennium Bug, which wasn’t actually a bug, just a method of keeping track of time which was never expected to be used beyond 1999. The problems occurred when the date in DD/MM/YY format rolled over from 31/12/99 to the year 00 and the software assumed the next value was 01/01/80, as 1980 is the year IBM created the first reasonable PC.
Aha! I thought. Why not give websites which don’t need to know my real D.o.B., and websites which I couldn’t trust not to abuse or lose the data, a credible alternative? 02/01/1980 looks a little more credible (to me) than 01/01/1980, and it seems to work. Even better, it puts me firmly out of the territory occupied by Millennial snowflakes.
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