"I scanned some of the recent data for clues to explain the poor performance," fish says. "Sorting recent records by date led to discovery that we had many records that were dated one to three decades into the future. And I noticed that these records were all associated with the same user."

There doesn't seem to be any connection between the odd dates and the performance problem. But fish reports his observation anyway.

That's when management lands on the offending user with both feet. The dates clearly can't be right. Do they indicate an interest-rate scam? Phantom mortgages? Some other attempt to game the system?

When the user is interrogated and the system is investigated, IT discovers that the application has been capturing the date on the local user's PC for record changes, not the system date on the server.

And the user with strangely dated records did indeed add several decades to his PC's date.