Maybe you stop and wait for someone to make the decision. That is what many computers do. Rather than give out false information, they stop. Dead in their tracks. Right in the middle of whatever they were doing.
Some computers ignore the fact that data is lost.
If the computer always adds 1900 to get the real year, time just retreated 100 years. Perhaps that computer controlling the power grid is monitoring changes in the grid, and needs to know over what time interval the changes occurred. Simple, just take the date and time when the last sample was taken, and subtract that from the time now. The answer is -99 years and some. The answer is now 100,000 times too small, and has the wrong arithmetic sign.