Good old budget-slashing Arnie wants to cut the wages of around 200,000 state workers to minimum wage, but has run into problems with the antiquated computer system that the State's payroll system runs on.

Now, I don't care that the guy who says it can't be done because the system is too old is Democratic state Controller John Chiang, who has already opposed the pay cut on principle and and legal grounds. The politics of the matter don't interest me. What interests me is that because California has waited to update this system for so long, it will cost an estimated $177 million to do so now.

The system is written in the programming language COBOL, which was widely used in the '60s and '70s, back in a time when few people knew how to use a computer. As you might have noticed, computers have come a long way since the days of punch cards and giant spinning reels of tape and the languages they use have advanced with them.

COBOL is an incredibly verbose language in which the simplest of instructions can require several lines of code. This makes is a nightmare to maintain, as most COBOL systems that are still in place have grown to several million lines long.

Arnie's Department of Finance say that they haven't been provided with evidence that the changes can't be made to the payroll system. The thing is, with COBOL coders being in such short supply (they're literally dying out), it's going to be difficult to even gauge how much work needs to be done, let alone actually write, test and implement the changes. The cost of making these changes, since they require a team of specialist coders, would likely outweigh the savings incurred by cutting the pay of these workers for a couple of months. And that doesn't even take into account that Arnie wants these changes made yesterday.

Of course, all that assumes that the system really is as badly coded as Chiang says. And from what I know of older COBOL based systems, it very well might be. Typically computer nerds don't fare well when they lie to juiced up jock types, so I'd wager that he's telling the truth.

It just so happens that I know COBOL. I'm by no means an expert, and haven't used it for years, but as we've established, most of the experts in the language are dead, or too old to be allowed near a computer. So, Arnie, call me, we'll sort something out.