futurama - Why aren't the Sunset Squad doing their jobs?

The Sunset Squad's objective is to take old people whose lifespan exceeds 160 years, and take them to a secret location in space where they then live in a simulated world waiting for the children to call. In two occasions I can think of, they haven't being doing their job right:

• Farnsworth escaped, and the Reaper bot doesn't capture him after he escaped.


• Mom is obviously over the normal age. Given that Mom was at least 20 before establishing MomCorp, she would have been over the age limit. Another thing would be that she had grey hairs before Farnsworth was completely bald.

Why hasn't the Sunset Squad been doing their jobs regarding these two cases?

Answer

The Sunset Squad takes people who have turned 160 years old, and we don't know for certain if Mom is this old yet. We know she has to be somewhere around probably 150, since Farnsworth starts working for her company 131 years prior in 2881. In addition, since Mom does have control over all robots on Earth (as shown in the episode "Mother's Day") then there's a good chance she may have control over the robots on the Near Death Star too, and thus be able to stop them from taking her.

Regarding the Professor, there may be some kind of error in the records of the Near Death Star that resulted from the events of the episode "A Clone of My Own" when the Professor was broken out by Fry, Leela, and Cubert (his clone). The group sneaks into the Near Death Star to rescue him by pretending that he has escaped and is being returned, with Fry pretending to be the Professor and Cubert hiding under his robe to give a DNA sample. Having the Professor checked in again when he was already inside may have messed up the internal records such that they wouldn't come looking for him again after he escaped.

I'm imagining some poor programming like the following could explain it:

class Retiree: public Human {

  int status;
  ...
public:
  void checked_in () {status++;}
  void died () {status--;}
  void escaped () {status--;}
  bool is_here () {return (status > 0);}
  ...
}

Two check-ins and one escape means he still shows as present!