"Real Y2K problems" joke

Ah, the things that drop into my mailbox... A fellow who manages one of the Y2K compliance projects at a major US-based multinational corporation reports the following (lightly edited to protect sources):

Apparently [a large food retail chain in Britain] with highly automated regional distribution centers was starting to receive canned goods with expiration dates running past 2000.

So, at the same time as they were receiving shipments of tinned tomatoes with shelf lives until' 05 (which were being shuffled into storage bins by their automated pallet system), their automated' expired goods' system was scanning the new stuff, thinking they had gone bad 92 years ago, pulling them, and putting them on to lorries which then took them to the dump.

[...] after trashing the' expired' tins, the automated system placed an order to the supplier to replace them.

Apparently some guy at the warehouse noticed this but didn't want to say anything [...]

It was only when the tomato company's sales rep said something like,' Jeez, you guys are selling a lot of our tinned tomatoes lately,' that they caught on.