Spooky Railway Ticket "Nullifies" my Birth and Berth Details!!!

I woke up very early today, to book a ticket to my home town in tatkal category. As you all know the a tatkal ticket can be booked two days prior to the day of departure. This was reduced from the 5 days prior system. Most of us would have faced the difficulties in accessing the online system to book a ticket in this 2 day advance tatkal reservation regime. Clearly when there were five days to book a tatkal ticket there was not much of a hurry and everyone would have atleast got a confirmed ticket if tried on the first day. Now in the current system because of the heavy network traffic the online tool takes years to come up at first and takes ages to complete a transaction, while you wait with bated breath, hoping against hope that you will get a confirmed ticket, since most of the times by the time the transaction happens you end up with a wait listed ticket or with a "no room" message. I have never waited like this with so much anticipation, even for my exam results. It is as if waiting for the results of a once-in-a-lifetime-examination-and you-have-to-get-through-it moment or a tense feeling of expecting a positive reply, about the health of your relative, from a grim doctor once he comes out of operation theatre.

Now finally my transaction went through after 20 mins of anxious moments but i was shell- shocked to see the ticket information. The age column displayed "0" against both my name my sisters name and the most amusing thing to be observed was the berths column. Berths "0" and "8824" were alloted in the compartment of the selected class of travel. Now i was wondering where do i find these berths in a train compartment. My thoughts raced to the Harry Porter movie where they look for an unexisting or a missing platform to board a train to Hogwarts. It was spooky and I was guessing wildly that if I and my sibling were selected to some Indian version of Hogwarts school and I never realised that I was a wizard so far!!! Too bad, I wasted lot of time working hard for my studies and work.

Anyways jokes apart, I used up all the grey cells of my brain and immediately typed the PNR number in another site of Indian railways and was relieved to see some believable numbers. Thank god I need not attend a wizard school afterall:)

I drew the following conclusions:-

1. Either the network traffic was so much that the database must have crashed and issued out some funny numbers which look like "null pointers" as in software lingo. the 8224 must be the maximum value the coder must have set. Thats funny because a train compartment in our country has at most 72 berths and why the need for such a garangutan number. May be some software guy should answer my question.

2. There is a bug in the tool and the software guy who wrote the JAVA code must have screwed it up and the QA guy must have done a poor job of testing it. (Sorry folks I dont mean to hurt anybody here. Its just to make some fun which I hope will be taken in a postive light). This is least possible since I strongly believe that Indian software engineers do a very good job.

Anyways I hope that when I board the train the TC does not allot me the numbers shown by the ticket. I recieved a mail regarding the ticket which tells the same shocking story of both my "birth" and "berth" details. Hail IRCTC!!!