Okay, why is this funny to geeks like me? UNIX (and some other) systems track time by counting the seconds since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970, referred to as the epoch. So, if it were one second past midnight on Jan. 1, 1970, the UNIX time (or POSIX time) would be "1". There's been a lot of seconds since then. :) Today, at 23:31:30 UTC (5:31:30 central time), it will be the 1234567890th second since the epoch. And that's just cool, in a nerdy kind of way.
A recently "interesting" time was 999999999, inspring a lot of Prince references. Another geeky fact about this representation is that the number is typically stored in a signed integer, meaning it actually has a pretty small amount of memory to fit inside of; small enough, in fact, that at 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, it will overflow, making 2038 another one of those "interesting" dates.
A former professor once told my class that you could measure the level of competence you've reached in a given subject by how easily you could crack jokes about the topic that would make ordinary people around you wonder what the devil you're going on about (paraphrased, but that was the gist of it). It struck me as an odd observation at the time, but he was definitely right.