Happy Birthday to Me, From Me, Sorta

A few years ago, I worked at a company that uses SAS, and has a SAS server set up. I figured out that scheduling a SAS job was a bit clunky in Windows, so I mitigated the problem by setting up a SAS program run any tasks on a schedule, and then scheduling that task in Windows.

Since the program was evaluating dates and times to schedule tasks, I threw in a few happy birthday emails as a joke. A few years later, I woke up today to find this in my email inbox:

Chris,

Happy birthday! I hope you have a great day!

Sincerely,

The [Company Name] SAS Server

Well, I'm surprised that's still running! At least it wasn't sent from my old account on that server: they had at least updated who was running the job. But I'm a bit surprised they still let this go. Either they don't realize that the scheduling code contains the happy birthday emails, or they don't mind.

As a side note, the program also ran CheckLog, which reviews the SAS log output for issues, and it emailed the author about the status of the program. This was better than running CheckLog within a program, since the program could crash before it even got to the end, resulting in no status update when it was the most critical.

At any rate, it's good to  know what I wrote is still useful, even if it contains a bit of questionable code!