Where to now?

If you are not hiding under your desk, afraid of the Millenium Bug...go read another rant!

Back to my main page...Y2K complaint!

Writer's note (W.J.): It is a sad day when to start out with this rant, I have to admit I find myself agreeing, somewhat, with the bane of newsgroups everywhere Terry Austin. So that being said, I hope you do not find this rant suspect or me terribly drunk.

What is it about each decade that brings out the absolute worst in conspiracy theories? Of course every decade seems immersed in its own brand of wacky theory. The 50's had Nazi survivors camped out in banana republics. The 60's, well, um too many drugs to be sure..maybe Viet Nam and The Man. The 70's had Watergate and UFO's. The 80's had the Kennedy Asassination and Reagan. The 90's have been inundated with UFO's and of course the millenium bug.

As the millenium gets closer the theories get nuttier. There seems to be no argument about that with the authors. Heck I imagine that conventional problems lasted maybe a day before hell bent gloom and doom set in. The belief is that nobody is really doing anything about it. How untrue could that be? Lets face it if you were the CIO or CFO of a major company I think you would be painfully aware on how and why your business is going to have problems and hire consultants to fix it. Heck even the government is coming along in gettign critical systems Y2K complaint. Lets face it, if the government is getting on the ball it must be pretty well implemented everywhere else.

Of course what theorists fail to look at is the fact that the cause of this whole issue was people not seeing the forest through the trees. Financial institutions, who typically have very long term transactions (ie mortgages, merger costs, etc.) should have seen this coming in 1971. But alas it seems programmers and IT managers thought two digits were enough for a date. Naturally when a supercomputer maybe had 16k, that might have been important.

Not to sound pollyanna but other than acounting, how many bad things can happen to pc's and other computer controlled components? Does the date flipping to 00 really effect anything. Going on the assumption the machine will think it is going into the year XX00, no. It will probably be off, but keep on working. But theorists conspire everything will go away, like power.

With the loss of power, we'll have no gasoline. Or food. Humanity will die. All of us.

Because theorists fail to think about how clever people really are. Worst come to worst, we do what we have always done, or have accomplished in other emegencies. We use our heads and almost unheard of things called pencils and paper. Stores in the Midwest did during last year's flooding. The Y2K people simply cry, "It's over." Geez, I've (M.B.) suffered from the utter crash of our accounting system. I kept track of what invoices were due by looking at the damn things and writing the due dates and amounts on the frigging desk calendar.

Of course the Y2K Chicken Little's fail to account for a simple fact that there are people around. I am sur epeople would let problems multiply and get out of hand. After all only their lives, families and friends would be in jeoprody. I know I sure would like to see all that gone. How about you?

They have passed goofy a long time ago. Honestly, here are some of the effects that they're predicting:

*The Power grid in the US goes down. *A nuclear spasm attack will occur. *No modern car will function due to the internal computers going down. *50% of all companies will lose their accounting system and go out of business. (BTW, M.B.: Ours went down three times last year, resulting in a loss of one day of data, three days of data, and one month of data. Yet we're still in business. And we've got 100% certainty that our current accounting system will crash when it hits 2000.)

However, these people are paranoid enough that they change their e-mail addresses every week, so tracking their personal data is rather hard. So that sure sound slike not only solid theorists, but solid theories. Yeah, please...must stop before I start ranting...oh wait, I am.

These same idiots are the ones advocating that you move at least 500 miles away from any major mass of people so that when they start rioting when the power fails, you'll be more than a full tank of gas away from the rioters. Of course, if the power fails, I'm going to fill up several jerry cans full of gas, and drive to wherever these people are and burn down their homes.

That'll teach them.