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Or the "Car allergic to vanilla ice cream" tale.

That one reminds me of the system I worked on years ago that wouldn't accept credit cards that expired in August or September (of any year).

I bet it was a Javascript system that tried to interpret month numbers of 08 and 09 as octal because of the leading zero. Am I close?

That's clearly a tale rather than a true event. The guy would have noticed during other extremely short trips that his car wouldn't start afterwards.