Stupid coding errors

This funny thing occurred, and I thought it might be interesting.

I was watching someone make a monthly payment on some financed item on Sams Club, and was having some trouble.

The problem was, the computer had a incorrectly configured clock, which had the date set as February 6th, 2012 (this took place on January 5th, 2012).

And, Sams Club's website was using that date as the default value for the payment date.

I thought "Okay, that's not too bad, I can probably just change the date on it". Wrong.

Since SamsClub.com was using Javascript (bad idea) to get the date, it was also setting it as the MINIMUM date, which meant you cannot put in a date before that!

Now, what's the problem with that?

Well, say I'm a week late on my payment. To make that payment on time, all I have to do is set my system's clock to one week ago, and Sam's club will happily take the payment as if it was delivered a week ago.

Lessons learned:

Never, ever use Javascript to figure out the current date.

Atleast check the date before inserting it into the database.

Hopefully this will reach someone at Sam's Club, and they'll fix it...