Y2K Laid An Egg |
At midnight December 31, 1999 the earth was supposed to stop turning. All sorts of catastrophes were predicted for the moment when the year 1999 would turn into 2000. Airplanes would fall out of the sky, electricity would stop flowing, toilets would stop flushing. An International Y2K Cooperation Center was set up to monitor and handle all the emergencies that would occur.
Unfortunately, nothing happened. We still write an occasional 99 instead of 00, but otherwise, practically nothing. For all the difference Y2K made, we may as well still be back in the last millennium.
Nobody planned for this contingency. There are now hundreds of thousands of people whose basements are filled with non-perishable foods, bottled water, emergency gasoline generators, guns and ammunition, who don't know what to do with all of it. They're giving so much emergency stuff to their local charities that the food banks are overflowing, and spending money to hire people to handle all the supplies they receive. There is now so much food in storage that no needy person will go hungry for the next six months.
If the Y2K Center really had confidence in the level of compliance, they would have provided for the possibility that there would be no problems. Everybody would feel so much better if the Federal Emergency Management Agency had arranged for a reasonable supply of Designated Y2K Disasters which could have been put into effect if no real ones occurred. For example, a few news items like these for us to read:
Dubuque, Iowa: The Grand Opening of the multimillion dollar state-of-the-art downtown Multilevel Millennium Mall was timed to coincide with the city's New Year's Eve celebration. Unfortunately, at the stroke of midnight there was a power failure, and hundreds of celebrants were stuck for as long as six hours on the mall's escalators.
Lagos, Nigeria: At 9:00 AM on Monday, the first work day of the new millennium, the traffic lights on all five north-south streets in the downtown area were out of order for fifteen minutes. If the press and media had been properly alerted, the resulting massive traffic tie-up would have received world-wide attention.
Washington, D.C.: Due to a computer error in the State Department, the Panama Canal was reclaimed by the United States. The current date on the treaty was erroneously rewritten to 1900, indicating that the Canal would belong to the United States for another hundred years. Republicans in Congress petitioned the Administration not to correct the error.
Phoenix, Arizona: Due to a computer error at the State Capitol, Arizona was sent back to the year 1900. Nobody noticed the difference.
These stories could have been added to the few things that really did happen: in Albany, New York, a customer returning a movie to a video rental shop was presented with a late fee of $91,250 because the computers showed the tape was 100 years late. At a video store in Florida, the computers failed and the employees actually had to use a pen and paper to figure out the charges. A German salesman temporarily became a millionaire when his bank's computer inflated his account to more than $6 million. In Golden, Colorado, the city stored so much water in anticipation of a pump failure that the mayor had to ask the people to take two or three baths a day to lower the level in the water storage tanks.
Such a contingency plan would have made everybody feel a lot better. We wouldn't now be going around saying what was the big deal, and why did we spend all that money correcting a problem that might not really have existed. And we wouldn't have felt so disappointed that nothing terrible happened when all the numbers on our chronological odometer turned to zero.
The biggest problem now is that nobody will believe anything any more. People won't pay any attention to the problems of global warming that will result in a melting of the polar ice caps, with a consequent rise in the ocean levels and flooding of our coastal cities. They won't worry about atmospheric pollution and the respiratory problems it will cause. Depletion of the world's oil supplies and water resources will be ignored. And nobody will care that in about 5 billion years the sun will have used up all its nuclear fuel and will no longer be able to support life on earth.